Modern Poetry after Modernism

MODERN POETRY AFTER MODERNISM

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M O D E R N P O E T R Y A F T E R M O D E R N I S M

James Longenbach

New York

Oxford

• Oxford University Press

1997

Oxford University Press Oxford

New York

Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Bombay Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1997 by James Longenbach Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Longenbach, James. Modern poetry after modernism / by James Longenbach. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-510177-4 (cloth); —ISBN 0-19-510178-2 (pbk.) I. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Postmodernism (Literature)—United States. I. Title. PS325.L66 1997 96-45288 811'. 509113—dc21

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

FOR A. WALTON LITZ

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PREFACE

This book was prompted by my sense that the stories we usually tell about American poetry cannot account for Elizabeth Bishop's career; it grew from my realization that those stories (usually turning on some sense of formal "breakthrough") cannot make good sense of most of Bishop's contemporaries. Like every poet of her generation, Bishop was keenly aware of what was at stake in writing after modernism; but she did not reduce the modern poets' various and contradictory qualities into an easily opposed program. Her career consequently exhibits no "breakthrough" but extends aspects of modernism that other writers suppressed or neglected to see. The poets I've associated with Bishop share her open relationship to their immediate past. They also share her attitude toward poetic form: whether it's called formal or free, open or closed, form is for these poets what constitutes their utterance, not something that needs to be (or could be) broken through. Whatever their similarities, these poets are also highly idiosyncratic. Each chapter of this book (except for the first) is shaped in response to the distinctive problems of a particular poet's career. And while the chapters are linked by common concerns, anyone wanting to read only about Wilbur or Ashbery will find my treatments of them pretty much

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self-contained. Anyone wanting a tidy narrative about American poetry after modernism might be disappointed. My goal is not so much to offer a story to replace the "breakthrough" narrative as to explore the different ways in which poets have harnessed their modernist past; I'd like to make it harder to rely on seductively oppositional accounts of twentieth-century literary history. While every generation of writers inevitably seeks to distinguish itself from an earlier one, it seems to me that some versions of our past are more useful—more responsive, more generous—than others. Inasmuch as this book is about postmodernism in American poetry, it takes the word postmodern as literally as possible. When the word is applied to poetry at all, it usually describes a particular school of poetry after modernism; a poet's place in that school is signaled by the use of certain ideologically charged formal strategies. I use the word postmodern to describe any poet who writes with a self-conscious sense of coming after modernism; from my perspective, poetic form has no inevitable relationship to any ideological position. Consequently, the cast of characters most often associated with postmodernism is not prominent here. A variety of postmodernisms must be discriminated, since the terms of one will not always account for the development of another: my terms are conceived in response to the circumscribed yet abundant world of American poetry. I've tried to translate the parameters of my own taste into the widest possible account of that world, one that may honor poets as different as Wilbur and Ashbery. If I haven't strayed from the more-or-less dominant figures of the last fifty years, I've tried to suggest that the mainstream of postmodern poetry is, like that of modern poetry, more strange and equivocal than we might imagine. The poets I've selected seem to me representative in that, however distinctive, they have not been invested heavily in distinctions. Resisting the need to balance enthusiasms with antagonisms, they have welcomed the diversity of their contemporaries and refused to limit the possibilities for poetry to a narrow set of formal strategies or an exclusive vision of their literary past. Most simply put, my goal is to provide a way of appreciating the variety of poetries written in our time—without necessarily requiring us to choose between them. Writing this book, my greatest debt has been to the poets who responded so generously to my discussions of their work: they became the best critics I could hope for. I want particularly to remember Amy Clampitt, who, shortly before her death, offered several important additions to my argument. I'm also grateful for the help of Robert Boyers, Bonnie Costello, Frederick Crews, Barbara Jordan, Susan Meigs, Adam

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Parkes, Christopher Ricks, John Shoptaw, and Willard Spiegelman. Langdon Hammer not only read this book as it grew, page by page, but fueled my interest with his own ongoing study of American poetry. Joanna Scott's imagination sustained me when my own failed. The Guggenheim Foundation and Worcester College, Oxford, provided time to write, and I'm grateful to David Bradshaw and Richard Smethurst for making my stay in Oxford so memorable. My research assistants, Mary Kelkenberg, Alyssa O'Brien, and Newell Young, never failed to find the material I needed. And the librarians of Amherst College, Vassar College, the Walnut Hill School, the Henry E. Huntington Library, the Rosenbach Museum and Library, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library helped me to locate many uncollected and unpublished texts. Earlier versions of several chapters of the book have appeared in American Literary History, ELH, Denver Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Salmagundi, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, and The Future of Modernism, ed. Hugh Witemeyer (Ann Arbor, 1997). The dedication records my debt to a critic who, more than any other I've known, embodies the qualities of openness and generosity that I've tried in this book to document and, however fitfully, to emulate.

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CONTENTS

ONE

What Was Postmodern Poetry? 3

TWO

Elizabeth Bishop's Bramble Bushes 22

THREE

Elizabeth Bishop's Social Conscience 35

FOUR

Randall Jarrell's Semifeminine Mind 49

FIVE SIX

Richard Wilbur's Small World 65 John Ashbery's Individual Talent 85

SEVEN

Amy Clampitt's United States 102

EIGHT

Richard Howard's Modern World 122

NINE TEN

Robert Pinsky's Social Nature 141 Jorie Graham's Big Hunger 158 Notes 177 Index 197

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MODERN POETRY AFTER MODERNISM

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O N E

WHAT WAS POSTMODERN POETRY?

Modern poetry holds in solution contradictory tendencies which, isolated and exaggerated in postmodernism, look startlingly opposed both to each other and to the earlier stages of modernism. This sentence was almost written by Randall Jarrell. Where Jarrell said romantic and modern, I've substituted modern and postmodern, and the resulting sentence not only offers a good way to begin thinking about the vicissitudes of American poetry over the last several decades; it also reminds us that those vicissitudes follow a pattern we've seen before.1 The words I've put in Jarrell's mouth are his own. Jarrell was by no means the first person to use the word postmodern (it appeared as early as 1926 in discussions of modernist theology); nor was he the earliest poet to feel that literary modernism had slipped into the past: "It is now possible," wrote Laura Riding and Robert Graves in 1928, "to reach a position where the modernist movement itself can be looked at with historical (as opposed to contemporary) sympathy."2 But by rethinking the vexed relationship of romantic and modern poetry, Jarrell was clearing the ground for the first fully meaningful discussion of poetry written in response to the work of T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore: "Who could have believed," he asked in 1942, "that modernism

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would collapse so fast?"3 Today, more than half a century later, our sense of modernism continues to change, but our characterizations of postmodern poetry too often depend on outmoded notions of modernism. While most readers of modern poetry have long since rejected the narratives supplied by New Critics like Allen Tate or Cleanth Brooks, the same readers often cling to those narratives in order to exaggerate the formal and political idiosyncracy of postmodern poetry. One version of that exaggeration is evident in this passage from John Ashbery's "The System." For many weeks you have been exploring what seemed to be a profitable way of doing. You discovered that there was a fork in the road, so first you followed what seemed to be the less promising, or at any rate the more obvious, of the two branches until you felt that you had a good idea of where it led. Then you returned to investigate the more tangled way, and for a time its intricacies seemed to promise a more complex and therefore a more practical goal for you, one that could be picked up in any number of ways so that all its faces or applications could be thoroughly scrutinized. And in so doing you began to realize that the two branches were joined together again, farther ahead; that this place of joining was indeed the end, and that it was the very place you set out from, whose intolerable mixture of reality and fantasy had started you on the road which has now come full circle. Having recognized these sentences as a rewriting of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken," should we then say that Frost believes that "all the difference" depends on our ability to choose between two different paths, while Ashbery shows such a choice to be specious, revealing difference to be a condition of our existence rather than the result of conscious decisions? That's the story Marjorie Perloff tells about these two poets, but it depends on our reading Frost as a poet of greetingcard wisdom rather than the poet who, in "The Road Not Taken," is like Ashbery undermining easy ideas of difference and suggesting that we live in some kind of indeterminacy.4 The speaker of Frost's poem wants to believe that the choice of one path over another has made all the difference, but his equivocations reveal that the paths make no difference at all. Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same. It's tempting to think of Ashbery's prose as an advance on Frost's tetrameters, but once we recognize the equivocations of "The Road Not

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Taken" ("as just as fair," "perhaps the better," "really about the same"), then Ashbery's "System" seems more like a repetition of Frost's skepticism than a turn away from it. Those of us who tell the stories of postmodern poetry are usually more invested in polemical distinctions than those of us who live them. Yet the most common story was supplied at least in part by the poet whose career it justifies. Reduced to its barest outline, the story goes like this: after writing several books of highly praised New Critical wellwrought urns (objective and impersonal), Robert Lowell understood that poetry could be fragmentary, subjective, personal, and the result was Life Studies, a watershed in twentieth-century poetry. Life Studies itself tells this story; the volume begins with formal poems that recall the high-church values of Lowell's earlier work, moving on to the free verse anxieties of poems about his family and his mental collapses. Lowell sometimes spoke of this movement as a "breakthrough back into life," as if free verse were not one kind of form among many but a movement beyond the merely literary.5 Psychic and political health, it seems, could be achieved by breaking the pentameter. This "breakthrough" narrative offers a narrow and inadequate reading even of Lowell's career. But in the "Age of Lowell," as Irvin Ehrenpreis dubbed it, readers found a similar aesthetic "breakthrough" (often accompanied by a psychological "breakdown") in the careers of many of Lowell's contemporaries, especially John Berry man and Theodore Roethke: a poet's status was often measured by the strength of what one reviewer called, apropos of Roethke, "the famous 'breakthrough' that it is the custom to talk about."6 The story of Lowell's life in poetry became, as he said in his late poem "For John Berryman," the story of a generation. Really we had the same life, the generic one our generation offered. Berryman might have approved of these lines, for in his later years he sometimes agreed with Lowell's sense of the limitations of Eliot's modernism. Berryman said this about the structure of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet: "let's have narrative, and at least one dominant personality, and no fragmentation! In short, let us have something spectacularly NOT The Waste Land." And this about the structure of The Dream Songs: "The reason I call it one poem is the result of my strong disagreement with Eliot's line—the impersonality of poetry."7 More is at stake here than one generation's need to distinguish itself from an earlier one. Inasmuch as there is a common theory of postmodern American poetry, the "breakthrough" narrative underwrites it,

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ostensibly explaining the careers not only of Lowell and Berryman but of W. S. Merwin, Frank O'Hara, Adrienne Rich, and many more recent poets. In From Modern to Contemporary James Breslin employs the story of Lowell's career—emphasizing its implicit equation of modernism with formalism, mere craft, and stultifying hierarchy—to account for the "breakthrough" of American poetry at large: "At this moment of crisis, poetry once again became disruptive—critical of its culture, of its immediate past, of itself; by way of repudiating orthodox modernism, American poetry once again became modern, 'of the present.' "8 Modernism emerges from this narrative as a movement whose poems are easily characterized as traditional, impersonal, and hierarchical. And though the narrative has been useful, our continuing faith in it depends (to put it somewhat simply) on a reading of The Waste Land as a unified and impersonal poem—something Cleanth Brooks could muster fifty years ago but which is difficult to sustain, given that our knowledge of Eliot's career has increased along with our suspicion of values like unity and impersonality. Now that Lowell's poetry has lost some of its prestige, the "breakthrough" narrative is no longer invoked quite so explicitly as it was two decades ago; nevertheless, its assumptions are perpetuated by many poets and critics who, whatever their differences, agree that a great deal of cultural weight depends on the choice of poetic form. More often than not, apparently opposed formal means are enlisted in defense of identical social ends: while some readers maintain that a rhymed and metered poem "is political in the sense that it is separating itself from the people," others insist that "by removing meter and rhyme" from poetry, poets are "alienating the audience."9 An easy confluence of formal and social vision is assumed, and almost any new development in American poetry is heralded at the expense of a previous "breakthrough," now seen to be either too timid or too severe. In contrast, readers who take the longest view of contemporary poetry have little use for the oversimplifications characteristic of the "breakthrough" narrative (though it is telling that, until recently, Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler have had little to say about Eliot at all). Robert Pinsky's The Situation of Poetry, published in 1976, powerfully undermined the logic of the "breakthrough" by stressing the rhetoricity of all poetic forms, however "open" or "closed" we imagine them to be. And more recently, in one of the subtlest accounts of contemporary American poetry, Vernon Shetley has argued that our most interesting poets "tried to find some kind of middle way between the alternatives of a poetry descended from Eliot" and "the oppositional poetics of a figure like [Allen] Ginsberg."10 From my perspective, the "middle way" was found not between

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Eliot and Ginsberg (however emblematically these names are employed) but within an Eliotic inheritance that poets found more varied and accommodating than most readers recognized; even the New Criticism offered Ashbery support in unpredictable ways. So while it's true that Thomas Hardy, Stevens, or H.D. have often served as alternate models, it is important to recognize that Ginsberg's poetry is in some ways a logical extension of Eliot's contradictory body of work. Those poets who were in the most literal sense postmodern (poets who, whatever their formal choices, were deeply aware of writing after the full flush of modernist achievement) did not stake their originality on a narrow reading of their forebears. It was not until the publication of The Waste Land manuscript that most of Eliot's critics began to see that the poem was, in Eliot's own words, not so much an austere "criticism of the contemporary world" as the anguished "relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life."11 But prescient readers had seen this side of Eliot long before the manuscripts revealed it. When Wallace Stevens read The Waste Land he ventured that "if it is the supreme cry of despair it is Eliot's and not his generation's."12 Randall Jarrell, who planned for years to write a book on Eliot's "psychological roots," agreed. Won't the future say to us in helpless astonishment: "But did you actually believe that all those things about objective correlatives, classicism, the tradition, applied to his poetry? Surely you must have seen that he was one of the most subjective and daemonic poets who ever lived, the victim and helpless beneficiary of his own inexorable compulsions, obsessions? From a psychoanalytical point of view he was far and away the most interesting poet of your century. But for you, of course, after the first few years, his poetry existed undersea, thousands of feet below that deluge of exegesis, explication, source listing, scholarship, and criticism that overwhelmed it."13 As Jarrell points out, poets of his generation had to contend not only with Eliot's own critical pronouncements; some of the New Critics exaggerated and codified the poetics of tradition and impersonality, disguising aspects of Eliot's poetry that Stevens could sense early on. In 1948 Berryman reviewed a large collection of what were by then canonical readings of Eliot by I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, F. O. Matthiessen, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks. "The book contains most of the best known studies of Mr. Eliot's work," said Berryman, "and will be useful." He had one serious complaint: "Eliot is found 'unified' and 'impersonal' everywhere, unutterably 'traditional,' and so on, all his

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favorite commendations.. .. Perhaps we have not got it yet. Perhaps in the end this poetry which the commentators are so eager to prove impersonal will prove to be personal, and will also appear then more terrible and more pitiful even than it does now."14 Berryman was right, of course. When he wrote these sentences, he was already at work on Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, and the effort to produce a poem with a dominant personality seems in this context an extension of Eliot's sensibility rather than a rejection of it. Berryman's later statements rejecting "Eliot's line" consequently seem more cagey than sincere, directed not so much at Eliot himself as at a critical establishment that smoothed his work into a "doctrine." The story of Berryman's career should explain that he was able to write The Dream Songs not only by resisting commonplace notions of Eliotic modernism but also by building on aspects of Eliot that most garden-variety literary critics did not want to notice. But if the "breakthrough" narrative can account for Berryman's career only partially, it cannot account at all for the careers (to name only a few) of Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, or John Ashbery. Because the narrative is often cast in the terms of masculine fortitude, it has helped to disguise the importance of many female poets. And male poets like Wilbur, who continues to work in traditional meters and forms, have often appeared "feminized" to readers who accept the terms of the narrative uncritically. Such poets have also been assumed, solely on the evidence of their formal choices, to be politically conservative. "The sociopolitical complacency and conservatism o f . . . Eisenhower's eight-year administration," says one recent critic of postmodern poetry, "finds its match in a poetics overawed by tradition and ruled by its sense of decorum."15 Common as this assumption is, it will make no sense of Wilbur, whose associations with the Communist Party were investigated by the FBI; nor will it make much sense of Ashbery, who remains a practicing Episcopalian. Wilbur himself has rightly rejected the attribution "of a kind of intrinsic sanity and goodness and even moral quality to received forms.... There's nothing essentially good about a meter in itself."16 To believe otherwise is to transform an arbitrary, historically conditioned coincidence (in its most vulgar form, free verse and free thinking) into a kind of transcendental certainty. The association of personal or social liberation with formal transgression (and the association of any ordering principle, even rhyme, with tyranny) is a good example of what Jurgen Habermas has called the "false negation of culture": everyday life "could hardly be saved from cultural impoverishment through breaking open a single cultural sphere—art."17 As Habermas suggests in "Modernity—An Incomplete Project," responding to a variety of postmodern theorists, no conception

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of aesthetic modernism will offer terms that account adequately for the social project of modernity at large. Consequently, our sense of what constitutes a postmodern literature cannot be limited (as Fredric Jameson once put it) to "a particular style" of writing.18 The poems of both John Ashbery and Richard Wilbur are shaped by a keen awareness of what is at stake in writing after Eliot and Stevens; their very different styles embody equally legitimate responses to modernism. And inasmuch as Ashbery and Wilbur are both deeply skeptical of the attribution of social power to any particular poetic form, the two poets have a great deal in common. Elizabeth Bishop shared their skepticism. With the Lowell who in 1957 told William Carlos Williams, "it's great to have no hurdle of rhyme and scansion between yourself and what you want to say most forcibly,"19 Bishop could not agree, because she understood that all forms of poetry, as linguistic confections, offer one or another screen through which the world is experienced. But a lingering distrust of conventional form continues to skew our sense of her development, despite the fact that she has become the most admired American poet of her generation. Many of Bishop's readers have attempted to increase her prestige by misrepresenting her subtle and gradual development as a breakthrough to freer forms, franker confessions, and more forceful politics. This is to read Bishop through a dated sense of modernism—even as that sense of modernism is in other contexts superseded. In contrast, William Meredith has hinted at Bishop's real importance by suggesting that "she will yet civilize and beguile us from our silly schools. The Olsons will lie down with the Wilburs and the Diane Wakoskis dance quadrilles with the J. V. Cunninghams."20 Because of her personal knowledge of Eliot (among other things), Bishop understood his work as if she had read The Waste Land manuscript, and her sense of her own relationship to modernism was consequently not so clearly or comfortably antagonistic. Lowell often said that it was Williams who catalyzed his conversion to free verse in Life Studies; other times, thinking of "Skunk Hour," he gave the honor to Bishop. Readers like Breslin have tended to focus on Williams because it's easier to contrast his values with the New Criticism, telling the story of Lowell's career as a linear trajectory rather than as an attractively circuitous muddle. In my reading, Bishop was the crucial influence precisely because it was not possible for Lowell—as it is not possible for us today—to align her work clearly with one camp or another. "You can see," Lowell once said, "that Bishop is a sort of bridge between Tate's formalism and Williams' informal art."21 In For the Union Dead (more than in Life Studies), Lowell began to write poems with a less assertive kind of rhetoric, poems he found more amenable

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to the vicissitudes of personal experience. Bishop herself learned to write such poems by reading, very carefully, the modernist poetry that many of her contemporaries thought of as closed and impersonal. By no means are all notions of postmodernism identical with antimodernism, whatever the currency of oppositional narratives in discussions of American poetry. While Jameson does maintain that postmodernism occurs when modernist works of art become "a set of dead classics," he also argues—more productively—that works embodying "the most classical high modernist aesthetic values" often seem "capable of a thoroughgoing rewriting into the postmodern text." Unwilling to establish a postmodern canon in clearly oppositional terms, Jameson extends this benefit of the doubt not only to more easily recuperated moderns (Roussel, Stein, or Duchamp) but to "mainstream moderns" such as Flaubert, Stevens, and Joyce. Yet when confronted by the poet who seems to me the most crucial representative of the mainstream, even this act of generosity is curtailed: "are all the classics of yesteryear rewritable in this fashion? . .. is T. S. Eliot recuperable?"22 Within the world of American poetry, Eliot has been recuperated many times over. Randall Jarrell's sense of a future for poetry became possible when he understood that what passed for Eliotic notions of modernism were far from inevitable; those notions could not even account adequately for Eliot himself. In 1934 Wallace Stevens wrote an introduction to Williams's Collected Poems that Jarrell read closely. "There are so many things to say about [Williams]," said Stevens. "The first is that he is a romantic poet. This will horrify him."23 Stevens's point was not only polemical, for (as his slightly defensive "Sailing After Lunch" reveals) he felt himself deeply to be a romantic poet. He did hope to shake up other people besides Williams, however, and in a review of Marianne Moore's Selected Poems he was willing to say that even Eliot was a romantic. Since Eliot had written the introduction to Moore's poems, surrounding her work with imagist and neoclassical precedents, Stevens's argument was especially provocative. After reading the review in manuscript, Moore told Stevens that his allusion to Eliot would "do him good."24 Having read Stevens on both Williams and Moore, Jarrell saw fissures in what had previously seemed to him the monolithic world of modern poetry—especially as he had been initiated into it by his New Critical teachers, Warren and Tate. In an introduction to his first collection of poems, The Rage for the Lost Penny (1940), and two years later in an essay called "The End of the Line," Jarrell was able to say definitively that " 'Modern' poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become." When this sentence was published in the early forties, its argument was unheard of, except by devoted readers of Stevens; critical works that

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would popularize the argument (like Frank Kermode's Romantic Image) lay decades in the future. But Jarrell's purpose was less to characterize modernism than, in revealing it as the end of the romantic line, to speculate about what might come next: "How," he asked, "can poems be written that are more violent, more disorganized, more obscure, more— supply your own adjective—than those that have already been written?"25 For a brief moment in the late thirties, W. H. Auden seemed to Jarrell to make a successful move beyond modernist violence, disorganization, and obscurity: "Auden at the beginning was oracular (obscure, original), bad at organization, neglectful of logic, full of astonishing or magical language, intent on his own world and his own forms; he has changed continuously toward organization, plainness, accessibility, objectivity, social responsibility."25 Jarrell tried to embody these values (both formal and political) in his own first poems— Love, in its separate being, Gropes for the stranger, the handling swarm, Sits like a child by every road With begging hands, string-dwindled arms —but almost immediately he thought that this movement in the right direction had gone too far: Dylan Thomas's rejection of plainness and accessibility soon suggested that Auden's poetry represented one more reaction to modern values rather than a potent turn away from them. While it was clear to Jarrell that modernism had passed, what was to take its place was not so clear. And though he sensed very cannily the affiliations of romantic and modern poetry, he was understandably less adept at sensing the similarly compromised relationship of modernism and whatever was to follow it. "During the course of [my] article," wrote Jarrell in his introduction to The Rage for the Lost Penny, "the reader may have thought curiously, 'Does he really suppose he writes the sort of poetry that replaces modernism?' "27 Jarrell declined to answer the question directly, but when John Crowe Ransom reviewed the book, he quoted extensively from Jarrell's characterization of moderism, conjecturing that his precocious student "forbids us to say yet that he is a post-modernist" but "probably he will be."28 Ransom himself was unwilling to suggest what a "post-modernist" poet might look like; he would rely heavily on Jarrell's essay once again when he offered a tentative glimpse of the future in the final pages of The New Criticism (1941). Jarrell would offer some more meaningful conjectures in his 1947 review of Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle. Mr. Lowell's poetry is a unique fusion of modernist and traditional poetry, and there exist side by side in it certain effects that

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MODERN POETRY AFTER MODERNISM one would have thought mutually exclusive; but it is essentially a post- or anti-modernist poetry, and as such is certain to be influential.29

Jarrell is unsure here if the right word would be anti-modernist or postmodernist, unsure if those two words mean different things. His use of the word nonetheless caught on quickly; a year later Berryman would remark that "Randall Jarrell... has described Lowell's poetry as 'postmodernist'; and one certainly has a sense that some period is drawing to a close."30 But Jarrell's confusion seems to me functional, or at least honest, in that Jarrell has given up his earlier conception of a postmodern practice, located in Auden and in his own early poems, that would supersede the long history of romantic and modern poetry. Lowell's poems represent "a unique fusion of modernist and traditional poetry," and that fusion now seems to Jarrell properly postmodern. But consider the poetry Jarrell was talking about—poetry that sounds, as Jarrell put it, like a man "grinding his teeth together till his shut eyes ache." A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,— The sea was still breaking violently and night Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet, When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light Flashed from his matted head and marble feet. Given our now commonplace stories about Lowell's career, these gnarled lines from "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" sound like the kind of poetry Lowell had to overthrow in order to reach the really new achievement of Life Studies. To many readers, the poem epitomizes New Critical or modernist practice and seems anything but post- or antimodern. Why did it seem that way to Jarrell in 1947? Explaining what was distinctive about the poems of Lord Weary's Castle, he said that their organization "resembles that of a great deal of traditional English poetry—especially when compared to ... semi-imagist modern organization."31 This sentence is more specifically descriptive of Lowell's career than Jarrell reveals. Lowell's famous conversion from the poetry of Lord Weary's Castle to the poetry of Life Studies was not the first "breakthrough" in his career—as Randall Jarrell knew well. In the late fifties, when Lowell sent poems to William Carlos Williams, his midlife mentor, he said, "At forty I've written my first unmeasured verse."32 That was a fib. When he first came to Harvard in 1935, Lowell was writing the sort of traditionally formalist poems that, so far as he knew, constituted poetry. But he met a young man named James Laughlin, fresh from a long visit to Rapallo, who was publishing an annual called New

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Directions and writing what Lowell called "deliberately flat descriptive and anecdotal poems" based on the practice of Williams.33 This contact initiated Lowell's first conversion: he became, following Laughlin, what seemed to Jarrell a modernist poet. His second conversion, following Tate and resulting in the poems of Lord Weary's Castle, transformed Lowell into what consequently seemed to be a postmodern poet: he had worked through what Jarrell called the "semi-imagist modern organization" of poetry to a "unique fusion of modernist and traditional poetry." For Jarrell, this postmodern poetry does not oppose modern poetry outright but fuses its sensibility with a formal tradition that modernism was thought to supersede. From Jarrell's point of view, consequently, Lowell's third conversion, resulting in the poems of Life Studies, could not represent a watershed in either Lowell's career or the history of American poetry: it represents a fork in a road that Lowell had passed many times before. Choosing one path or the other didn't make all the difference, since each led to the very place Lowell had set out from. That fork would be negotiated many times after Lowell, and it was negotiated many times before him too. Ezra Pound proclaimed, late in his life, that "to break the pentameter, that was the first heave." But when we read his early career in detail, it's clear that Pound turned to free verse not as an alternative to formal verse (this distinction would have seemed bizarre to Pound) but as one more rhetorical possibility among the multitude of metrical and rhythmic experiments he was conducting. Soon afterwards, when free verse became an orthodoxy rather than a possibility, Pound broke rank: as he recalled many years later, he and Eliot "decided that the dilutation of vers libre, Amygism, Lee Masterism, general floppiness had gone too far and that some countercurrent must be set going.... Rhyme and regular strophes."34 The results were the crisply rhymed quatrain poems of Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and Eliot's Am Vos Prec, which did not influence Williams (as the imagist Pound had) but did shore up the anti-Romanticism of Ransom and Tate. In his introduction to Lowell's Land of Unlikeness, published in 1944, Tate proclaimed that "T. S. Eliot's recent prediction that we should soon see a return to formal and even intricate metres and stanzas was corning true, before he made it, in the verse of Robert Lowell." Eliot had made that prediction in his 1942 essay "The Music of Poetry," but Tate needed to ignore earlier precedents in order to make Land of Unlikeness seem like a pivotal achievement: Lowell's turn to traditional meters repeated the earlier turns of Hart Crane's White Buildings, Auden's Look, Stranger!, Pound's Mauberley, and Eliot's own Ara Vos Prec. The poetic practices that seemed to Jarrell modern and postmodern—and that often continue to seem so today—represent not mutually exclusive, but complementary

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alternatives that grew out of the far from monolithic practice of modern poetry. 1 he precedent set by Hart Crane was particularly vexing to Tate, and, in telling ways, Crane continues to vex us today. Eighteen years before he wrote the introduction to Land of Unlikeness, Tate wrote the introduction to Hart Crane's White Buildings: in retrospect, those eighteen years amount to a much shorter period of time than the four years separating White Buildings from The Waste Land. Crane is arguably the first American poet to come of age with a strong sense of a modernist achievement behind him (rather than feeling, as even the terminally belated Williams did, that he was Eliot's contemporary), and Crane's way of reacting to modernism established a pattern on which American poets continue to spin variations. Although a fully meaningful discussion of postmodernism in American poetry begins with Jarrell, the postmodern impulse has existed for almost as long as there has been a modernist achievement that poets could look back on. The story of Crane's career is well known, but it is a messier story—a less neatly oppositional story—than is usually acknowledged. Like Lowell, Crane became a disappointment to Allen Tate; both poets seemed at first to write poems compatible with Tate's critical principles, and both poets later appeared to desert those principles, Lowell in Life Studies and Crane in The Bridge. Like Berryman, Crane sometimes said that his own work was designed as a correction of Eliot's; his way of reading The Waste Land seems alternately confrontational and responsive. But the poet he corrected was the Eliot codified by his friends Winters and Tate: before The Sacred Wood gave his friends their rules of taste, Crane came to know the poet Jarrell thought of as one of the most daemonic who ever lived—a poet who seems more similar to the author of The Bridge than not. In a 1922 letter, Crane responded to Tate's anxiety over Eliot's influence by copying down this passage from "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry," one of Eliot's uncollected essays. Admiration leads most often to imitation; we can seldom remain long unconscious of our imitating another, and the awareness of our debt naturally leads us to hatred of the object imitated. If we stand toward a writer in this other relation of which I speak we do not imitate him, and though we are quite as The quotation breaks off here because the remainder of the letter has been lost. Eliot's essay continues, likely to be accused of it, we are quite unperturbed by the charge. This relation is a feeling of profound kinship, or rather of a pe-

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culiar personal intimacy, with another, probably a dead author. It may overcome us suddenly, on first or after long acquaintance; it is certainly a crisis; and when a young writer is seized with his first passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks even, from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person.... We may not be great lovers; but if we had a genuine affair with a real poet of any degree we have acquired a monitor to avert us when we are not in love.... We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of the changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become bearers of a tradition.35 Eliot had a great deal to say about influence in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," the centerpiece of The Sacred Wood, but instead of the official pronouncement, Crane remembered an essay (never reprinted) that had appeared in the Egoist three years before he sat down to write his conciliatory letter to Tate. Recently, "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry" has become as important to Eliot's critics (even Harold Bloom has cited it) as "Tradition and the Individual Talent" was to Tate. But if Tate ever read the passage Crane sent him, he immediately suppressed it. In order to keep his vision of Eliot whole, Tate needed to understand the formal and emotional chaos of The Waste Land as a selfconscious dramatization of the failure of the antiromantic values Eliot articulated in The Sacred Wood and the programmatic quatrain poems of Am Vos Prec. An Eliot who spoke of influence as a homoerotic "love affair" reft by "crisis" and "passion" (rather than an ordered assessment of existing monuments) might really have believed in the beauty and power of "the awful daring of a moment's surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract." The same Eliot was especially attractive to Crane. He often said that "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" was a response to The Waste Land, but his poem was nearly completed when Eliot's long poem appeared in the Dial in 1922. One detail was inserted after Crane read The Waste Land. And yet, suppose some evening I forgot The fare and transfer, yet got by that way Without recall,—lost yet poised in traffic. These lines present the turn in "Faustus and Helen" from the claustrophobic space of the mind to the world beyond, and they are meant to recall Eliot's Phlebas the Phoenician, who "forgot. . . the profit and loss" and suffered a sea-change. In contrast to Tate, who read The Waste Land as the negative example of Eliot's true social vision, Crane read the "Death by Water" lyric as an augury of imminent rebirth and re-

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demption—the kind of metamorphosis or quickening that Eliot described in "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry." Crane would later make a similar allusion for the same purpose in the "Van Winkle" portion of The Bridge: "And Rip forgot the office hours / and he forgot the pay." At this point in the long poem, the poetic quester leaves the private world of sleep and dreams to begin his journey to and fro in the earth. Read through Tate's perspective, the ecstasies of "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" and The Bridge would appear to resist Eliot's so-called classicism; but Crane's response to The Waste Land was already contained within an Eliot more divided and strange than Tate's codifications of The Sacred Wood could allow. Tate's and Winters's eventual dissatisfaction with The Bridge was a kind of displaced critique of the romantic Eliot they could not afford to recognize. Despite its enthusiastic admirers, The Bridge stands in the no man's land between enemy camps that are staked out in the world of American poetry to this day, and it has never found a comfortable place in the annals of modern poetry. Even as critics and poets of the last twenty years have rescued Crane from critical judgments dominated by a straw-man Eliot, some of Tate's blindness continues to limit their readings. Since the fall of the New Criticism, as Eliot's stock has declined and Crane's risen, Crane's champions have stressed the revisionary power of his correction of Eliot; Whitman and Blake become the heroes in a contest against Dante and Donne. But this story remains plausible (paradoxically enough) only if its narrators continue to accept the most dogmatically New Critical notions of the author of The Waste Land, refusing to see how much of Eliot's achievement was fueled by his admiration for a literature outside the canon defined by Winters or Tate. The Bridge follows The Waste Land in the same way that John Ashbery's "The System" responds to "The Road Not Taken": the poems seem antagonistic only if we continue to accept a strategically oversimplified reading of our modernist past. Life Studies, which Tate asked Lowell not to publish, includes a poem spoken in Hart Crane's voice: Lowell wanted to associate his breakthrough with what Tate led him to think of as Crane's rejection of Eliot. "Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age," wrote Lowell, masquerading as Crane, "must lay his heart out for my bed and board." The implication of these lines is that Lowell's self-transformation in Life Studies has been equally catastrophic. But as Langdon Hammer has discovered, "Words for Hart Crane" began its life as "(An) Englishman Abroad (1950)," a poem virtually identical to the final version except that it nowhere refers to Crane: "Crane's name and example were later fitted, a little roughly, into a formula Lowell had on hand."36 The formula was

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the "breakthrough" narrative, which fits Crane's poetry as roughly as it fits Lowell's. Like Crane before him, Lowell was productively inconsistent in his attitude towards Eliotic values. "I seesaw back and forth between something highly metrical and something free," said Lowell in an unguarded moment; "there isn't any one way to write."37 A "seesaw" is a much more suggestive metaphor for Lowell's development than a "breakthrough," one that allows us to appreciate the wide range of Lowell's accomplishment, much as we have come to see Crane's or even Eliot's. Today, Lowell more often appears as a minor, catalyzing figure in critical narratives about Bishop's career, much as Bishop once appeared as a footnote to Lowell's formal breakthrough. While this shift is partly due to an increased recognition of Bishop's real power, it is also a byproduct of the inevitable turn, following Lowell's death, against a poet who helped to create the taste by which he was judged. But if readers who came of age at the height of Lowell's popularity continue to belittle him, younger poets continue to read him productively. As Robert Hass has suggested, dismissals of Lowell's power too often seem "to be based on the sociology of Kenyon College or the fact of meter or Lowell's early models, on everything but a reading of the poems."38 For Hass, the New Critical ascendancy or the fact of meter are no longer fighting matters. Judgments such as his suggest that Lowell will soon resemble the Eliot whom, with Crane's help, we can see today: a poet whose reputation was overwhelming, even stifling, during his lifetime—but a poet who remains vital because other writers could see aspects of him that the reputation obscured. This Lowell will become clearer to us if we jettison the "breakthrough" narrative and its attendant mystifications of modernism, politics, and poetic form. We may also need to abandon the notion that Life Studies is the crucial achievement in Lowell's career. Like Lord Weary's Castle, which derives much of its power from its repudiation of Lowell's Puritan past, Life Studies establishes its authority (as I've suggested) by telling the story of Lowell's rejection of an earlier style and self. Sternly confrontational, the book has lost some of its power because the battles in which it engages no longer seem quite so meaningful. As Bishop recognized most clearly when she wrote to Lowell about his use of Elizabeth Hardwick's anguished letters in The Dolphin ("art just isn't worth that much"),39 Lowell had a tendency to stake his poetic claim at the expense of almost anything: this is what can make his poems seem simultaneously appalling and seductive. In his review of Bishop's North & South, Randall Jarrell made the following comment about Bishop's values; appearing just a few months before his review of Lord Weary's Castle, in which he worried about

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Lowell's "denunciatory prophetic tone," the comment seems to address Lowell's values as well. She is morally so attractive, in poems like "The Fish" or "Roosters," because she understands so well that the wickedness and confusion of the age can explain and extenuate other people's wickedness and confusion, but not, for you, your own; that morality, for the individual, is usually a small, personal, statistical, but heartbreaking or heart-warming affair of omissions and commissions the greatest of which will seem infinitesimal, ludicrously beneath notice, to those who govern, rationalize, and deplore.40 I think Jarrell had Lowell in mind here, for throughout his career Lowell sometimes was a poet who governs and deplores—a poet who does feel that the wickedness and confusion of the age can explain his own. Lowell told Bishop that when he sent Life Studies to Philip Rahv, editor of Partisan Review, Rahv said, " 'Diss is da break-through for Cal [Lowell] and for poetry. The one real advance since Eliot.' " Lowell went on to give Bishop the credit: "really I've just broken through to where you've always been."41 But when Lowell adapted Bishop's loosened-up formal strategies in the breakthrough poem "Skunk Hour," he did not necessarily pick up Bishop's values. As Lowell came to recognize, "I thought that civilisation was going to break down, and instead I did."42 Apocalyptic fervor fills both Lord Weary's Castle and Life Studies, and it's a trait one finds nowhere in Elizabeth Bishop—except in her jacket blurb for Life Studies. (On the jacket of A Cage of Spines, in contrast, she praised May Swenson for "a directness and optimism that are unusual in these days of formulated despair.") This is why Lowell's poems could seem so particularly astonishing in the "tranquillized Fifties," as he dubbed the decade; this is also why the poems may seem less relevant—unfairly so—today: Life Studies was too easily accommodated by readers who, like Rahv, had championed a prophetic Eliot. The Lowell who will continue to astonish is the poet who seduces without appalling—the poet for whom art is not worth that much, the poet who does not stake his authority on aggressive gestures of confrontation, whether stylistic or thematic. Seamus Heaney, who has learned a great deal from Lowell, writes perceptively of the "ruling passion for sounding victorious" that drives both Lord Weary's Castle and Life Studies, however antithetically the two books may have been conceived. The Lowell who matters to Heaney is the poet of a "less assertive voice," the poet who "relaxed the method of decisive confrontation which he had pursued in Life Studies."43 This poet is audible most consistently in Day by Day, Lowell's autumnal last book; but it did not take Lowell a lifetime to become this poet. The less assertive voice is

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heard in many of the poems of For the Union Dead, the book that followed Life Studies (and languished in the shadow of Lowell's "breakthrough"). Our end drifts nearer, the moon lifts, radiant with terror. The state is a diver under a glass bell. A father's no shield for his child. We are like a lot of wild spiders crying together, but without tears. Nature holds up a mirror. One swallow makes a summer. It's easy to tick off the minutes, but the clockhands stick. Back and forth! Back and forth, back and forth— my one point of rest is the orange and black oriole's swinging nest! These lines from "Fall 1961" are immediately recognizable as Lowell's; but even though they treat one of Lowell's signature topics—a Cold War sense of impending doom—their tone is unemphatic, the voice more domestic than prophetic. The poem does not rationalize or deplore; it establishes its authority through a focused attention on common things (the ticking clock, the swinging nest) and received wisdom ("Nature holds up a mirror. / One swallow makes a summer"). Perhaps most important, the poem's relationship to its own form feels unpolemical: the gentle syntax is achieved within (not in spite of) the formal requirements of the poem; the unstressed rhymes are not forced to embody the poet's sense of what constitutes freedom and oppression outside the world of poetry. Given the quiet way in which Lowell faces wickedness and confusion in this poem, it seems appropriate that one of its most compelling images is adapted from Elizabeth Bishop's response to the music of Anton Webern: "It's like a lot of spiders crying together but without tears."44 "Fall 1961" does not sound like Bishop,

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but neither do we feel that the poem compels us to choose unnecessarily—that its power is bought at the expense of anything else. As we look toward the future, a critical narrative that forces us to choose between Lowell and Bishop (or between Eliot and Crane) will only provide ammunition for the next inevitable backlash. So while it's true that, like most readers, I prefer certain poets to others, my goal is to offer an account of American poetry after modernism (beginning with Crane's example) that allows us to choose from among a variety of poetic practices, not between them. There is a long tradition in romantic poetry of associating the desire for originality with anxiety and competition; but there is an equally long tradition of associating it with openness and generosity. "The only means of strengthening one's intellect," said Keats, "is to make up one's mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts."45 Lowell and Berryman were famously jealous of each other's achievement, but even Berryman could say, apropos of Lowell, that "there is no competition either on Parnassus or on the hard way up there. Darley, that is, with Nepenthe and a lyric or so, is as good as Keats."46 This is not a critic's idealism but the working poet's real generosity, born of a humble sense of how difficult it is to write good poems, much less the great ones. It is sometimes difficult to separate generosity from a lack of sharpened critical tools; anyone can enjoy a good fight over the canon, as long as the weapons are sharp enough to be interesting in themselves. For too long, however, such battles have held our attention at the expense of American poetry. Even if we date the postmodern impulse to Jarrell's early essays (rather than to The Bridge), the impulse has a longer history than modernism had when Harry Levin asked the question what was modernism? in 1960. But my reasons for dwelling on Crane, Jarrell, or Bishop are not only historical. That is, while I think that Crane's relationship to Eliot has been oversimplified, I also think that the future of American poetry depends on a more finely tuned understanding of that relationship. At the same time, I don't think that any particular imperative—that poetry must become more difficult, more accessible, more formal, more disjunctive, more self-conscious—is ever very useful. Questioning recent manifestations of antimodernism, Theodore Weiss (born a year before Lowell) suggests, "surely one may complain about critical positions and poetic practices that, whatever their reasons, tend to shrink the world of poetry, to limit its possibilities."47 The positions that are currently available do shrink the world of poetry. They force us to choose between competing ideas of what poetry might be, and each of those ideas forces us to understand modernism as a diminished thing. Our ideas about postmodernism are only as good as our ideas about

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modernism. By reconsidering the terms of the "breakthrough" narrative, I think we can see even more clearly than Jarrell could fifty years ago that our postmodernism is usually not an antimodernism, however deep our need for polemical distinctions has been—or remains. In 1991 the Poetry Society of America sponsored a forum called "Free Verse vs. Formalism: Robert Bly and Brad Leithauser." From the perspective of the final decade of the century, these distinctions have begun to look wildly dated, and it's time to begin asking the question, what was postmodern poetry? A tentative answer might be found in this sentence, which was almost written by Randall Jarrell: Postmodern poetry was, essentially, an extension of modernism; it was what modern poetry wished or found it necessary to become.

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Elizabeth Bishop's first meeting with Marianne Moore, outside the third-floor reading room of the New York Public Library, has become a crucial episode in stories told about Bishop's career. Missing from those stories is an account of a meeting that took place a year earlier, this one with a modernist poet more threatening and more crucial to Bishop's sense of what it meant to be a writer. In the spring of 1933, T. S. Eliot came to Vassar College to attend the premiere production of his fragmentary drama Sweeney Agonistes. He also read his poetry to Vassar students and submitted to an interview for the Vassar Miscellany News: Elizabeth Bishop conducted the interview. The following week, this report appeared in the Miscellany News. Before reading selections from The Waste Land, Mr. Eliot declined to explain it, saying that he had read explanations of it which were much better than his own intention. Critics have called it a "criticism of the contemporary world," but "to me," he confessed, "it was just a piece of rhythmical grumbling."1 This remark by Eliot rings bells today because it appeared as the epigraph to the facsimile edition of The Waste Land manuscript (-with a more 22

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dubious provenance than this newspaper report provides—recorded by Henry Ware Eliot, Jr., who heard it quoted by Theodore Spencer). In the last twenty years this remark has become crucial to readings of Eliot's poem in the way that chatter about "mythical method" once was; but before 1971 the remark—and its implications about Eliot's status as culture czar—was virtually unknown. Imagine, then, what it must have been like for a young poet to hear Eliot describe The Waste Land in these terms in 1933. Decades before it became fashionable to do so, Bishop would argue (as Mary McCarthy remembered) that Eliot's poem is " 'about impotence.' Not symbolic impotence—it's about the thing."2 Bishop's reading of Eliot was of course determined by more than this brief encounter, but the meeting is emblematic of her way of reading Eliot. Soon after interviewing Eliot, Bishop wrote an essay called "Dimensions for a Novel." In this early stage of her career Bishop was as devoted to the writing of fiction as she was to poetry: her very first professional publications were short stories, and she described herself in the contributors' column of The Magazine as "writing a novel about family life in a Nova Scotia village." Her plan for this novel, like Randall Jarrell's prose of the same period, reveals a strong desire to produce something different from her modernist forebears. As much as Bishop admired the work of Joyce, Mann, Proust, and Woolf (she discussed them all), she thought that their moment had passed. But as she sketched out a theory for a kind of narrative that might supplant theirs, she grounded this self-conscious foray into a postmodern practice in the work of T. S. Eliot. Not Eliot as Allen Tate read him: Bishop came face to face with the more strange and malleable poet Hart Crane discovered in "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry." Bishop began "Dimensions for a Novel" by quoting the well-known passage from "Tradition and the Individual Talent" about the "existing monuments" of literary history forming an "ideal order" that is altered by the introduction of the "really new" work of art. "Whoever has approved this idea of order," Eliot concluded, " . . . will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past."3 This passage has accumulated a complicated critical history, for it supports contradictory readings. The more dogmatic of the New Critics tended to ignore that final sentence and focus on words like "monuments" and "order," preferring the Eliot who wrote finely metered poems and stressed the values of impersonality and objectivity. More recently, Eliot's readers have emphasized the final sentence, fortified by their knowledge of Eliot's investment in postHegelian skepticism and his resulting awareness of the contingency of anything like impersonality. Bishop read "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in the same way

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(as a theory of hermeneutic indeterminacy), and she reoriented Eliot's focus from the continual remaking of historical narratives to the continual remaking of fictional narratives. A constant process of adjustment is going on about the past— every ingredient dropped into it from the present must affect the whole. Now what Mr. Eliot says about the sequence of works of art seems to me to be equally true of the sequence of events or even of pages or paragraphs in a novel. I have mentioned what I call the "march" of the novel, implying movement and a linear sequence to the writing; but I know of no novel which deliberately makes use of this constant readjustment among the members of any sequence. Though modern novelists complicate the time structure of their work, Bishop explained, that complication nevertheless takes place within a well-made novelistic structure that "keeps its front." Searching for a narrative that would read more like Beckett's "The Unnamable" than Joyce's Portrait, Bishop suggested that a novel should not only show the "perpetually changing integration of what has been written with what is being written"; in addition, "the recognition itself of what is being written must be kept fluid." She confessed that were she to diagram the narrative structure of the kind of novel she had in mind, it would look, even if greatly oversimplified, "something like a bramble bush."4 For Bishop, Eliot's prose ultimately justified narrative structures nothing like a well-wrought urn. Little of the novel for which Bishop's essay provided the "dimensions" survives, but several of Bishop's early, uncollected stories attempt the kind of narrative experiments she had in mind. In "Chimney Sweepers" and "Mr. Pope's Garden" she constructs fictional narratives from factual materials, appending scholarly footnotes whose irony it is difficult to gauge. In "Seven-Days Monologue" she comes closer to realizing her "bramble bush" with a sequence of journal entries that confound any clear sense of temporal progression and thwart any sense of narrative closure. In one of the entries Bishop offers a parable that epitomizes her stuctural aims. Like two dim forests edging together the Now and the Then stood, almost silent. What strange animals crept to the verge of each and stared at one another from their own territories? What rough or velvet coats, and fearful eyes, bright claws and teeth, did each side see? Their shadows wove together and their sunlight and moonlight were the same, but they never approached each other, never mated.5

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"Seven-Days Monologue" possesses more narrative coherence than this passage might suggest: even as Bishop wanted her work to embody her Eliotic sense of the indeterminacy of understanding and perception, she didn't want her bramble bushes to remain untrimmed by the shears of Horatian clarity. Bishop understood from the start that bramble bushes could never grow "naturally" because they were inevitably shaped by whatever rhetorical tools she possessed. In writing poems (which quickly became the focus of her creative energies) she came to see that her bramble bushes—poems that seemed in motion, poems able to accommodate a jumble of observations—did not necessarily require the rejection of what she once called poetry's "ancient, honorable rules."6 Among the poets she loved best, Gerard Manley Hopkins helped Bishop to see that poetic structures could be bent but never broken through. As David Kalstone has suggested, Bishop admired Hopkins not for his obvious effects (the quick alliterations and gnarled syntax) but for the kind of rhythmic movement that, as Hopkins himself put it, combined "opposite and, one wd. have thought, incompatible excellences, markedness of rhythm . .. and naturalness of expression."7 Discussing the motion of Hopkins's poems in her 1934 essay on the poet, Bishop offered this parable, equating the poet and her poem with a marksman and his target: "the poet is set on bringing down onto the paper his poem, which occurs to him not as a sudden fixed apparition of a poem, but as a moving, changing idea or series of ideas.... [T]he target is a moving target and the marksman is also moving." This is a reworking, in subtler terms, of Bishop's thoughts about narrative bramble bushes: not only is the stuff of the poem in motion, so is the process by which that stuff is apprehended and then given the illusion of closure and coherence. Bishop admired Hopkins because he resisted that illusion: "Hopkins, I believe, has chosen to stop his poems, set them to paper, at the point in their development where they are still incomplete, still close to the first kernel of truth or apprehension which gave rise to them.... In this manner the boundaries of the poem are set free, and the whole thing is loosened up."8 Marianne Moore's poems, with their combination of intricate design and prose rhythm, reinforced some of the lessons Bishop learned from Hopkins. But Bishop's own poems were loosened up in a way that Moore's were not: while Moore's poems transform description into a structural principle, Bishop's turn the process of describing into a structural principle. To adopt a phrase Bishop quoted from the critic Morris Croll in her Hopkins essay, Moore's poems offer the mind's achievement of thought while Bishop's offer "not a thought, but a mind thinking."9 Jarrell once described Moore's poems as "visual and

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instantaneous rather than auditory and temporal, a state rather than a process," and the terms he rejects (auditory, temporal, a process) would fit Bishop's poems well.10 As Bishop herself put it in the Hopkins essay, she tried to set poems to paper "at the point in their development where they are still incomplete." Early on, Bishop's effort to "set free" the "boundaries" of her poems is more subtle than in later poems such as "At the Fishhouses," since the effort did not necessarily involve a rejection of those things that constitute the boundaries of poems. In 1935 Bishop's first professionally published poem was "The Imaginary Iceberg." We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship, although it meant the end of travel. Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock and all the sea were moving marble. In this quatrain, rhymes have mutated into alternating stressed and unstressed endings, and as the poem progresses, the pattern of this opening quatrain disintegrates further so that we might not even notice that the poem consists of three identically shaped stanzas, each ending with a couplet. Even as the formal pattern of "The Imaginary Iceberg" is loosened up, the poem itself seems to emphasize enclosure and completion rather than openness and looseness: "This iceberg cuts its facets from within," a self-sustaining artifact that "a sailor'd give his eyes for." But Bishop's irony is keen, for the problem with this well-wrought iceberg is that it forces us to hand over our powers of perception; it is "imaginary" rather than "imagined," and that is the problem. Like several of Bishop's earliest poems ("The Weed" and "The Monument" come to mind), "The Imaginary Iceberg" is a fable that, while enacting Bishop's values of openness and looseness on the minute level of poetic structure, demonstrates thematically the dangers of enclosure and completion. In her famous poem "The Fish," in contrast, Bishop was able to demonstrate the value of openness and discovery within the poem's unfolding of its thematic content. She provides at the beginning of "The Fish" no sense of its conclusion; instead, the poem seems to discover its direction only as we read it, and (as in Bishop's parable) both the target and the hunter are in motion. The fish and the fisherman become apprehensible to us through the sequence of similes characterizing the fish. (Metaphors, suggesting firmer equivalencies, are avoided.) Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper,

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and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost though age. This fish is not "imaginary" (Bishop emphasizes its brute otherness by dwelling on its sharp gills and sea-lice) but it is, unlike the iceberg, "imagined": that is, it makes sense—tentatively—only as values are attributed to it. By its very otherness the fish seems to teach the speaker how to imagine and therefore appreciate her world. The epiphany in the poem's final lines, when everything is "rainbow, rainbow, rainbow," becomes possible when the speaker turns from the fish and sees a rainbow in the oil spread out in the ugly rented boat. Having begun by setting down the poem when still "incomplete" (to borrow the terms of her essays), Bishop ends by demonstrating "not a thought but a mind thinking." Marianne Moore herself recognized that Bishop's essays on Hopkins and modern fiction provided a foundation on which Bishop's poems would stand for many years to come; when Bishop was planning her first book, Moore suggested that she publish a combination of poetry and prose, including her early stories and essays: they "support. .. and necessitate one another," she urged.11 Bishop's career demonstrates not so much a linear development as a continual unfolding of the possibilities inherent in positions she articulated early on. And those possibilities continued to unfold, dramatically so, in more adventurous poems like "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance" and "At the Fishhouses," published a decade after the essays (though begun much earlier). In contrast to "The Fish," "Over 2,000 Illustrations" rejects a "linear sequence" for what Bishop called (extending Eliot's discussion of tradition) a "perpetually changing integration of what has been written with what is being written." Yet within the poem her attitude toward this kind of associational structure—and the mode of comprehension it implies—is initially ambivalent. "Thus should have been our travels," the poem begins, comparing the uncertainty of travel with the clarity of the engravings in the family Bible. The lines the burin made are like "God's spreading fingerprint," and the sense of order this metaphor conjures up is stultifying: the illustrations are "familiar," "obvious,"— "they all resolve themselves." The stories they tell are not only predictable but sinister, and worse, they perpetuate the values of a wellclosed mind: "Often the squatting Arab, / or group of Arabs, plotting, probably, / against our Christian empire." By the end of this first movement of the poem, we sense that the initial attraction to these engravings has been dispelled by the act of

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describing them. With no transition, the second movement of the poem launches on an apparently random catalogue of the travels dismissed in the poem's opening line. Entering the Narrows at St. Johns the touching bleat of goats reached to the ship. We glimpsed them, reddish, leaping up the cliffs among the fog-soaked weeds and butter-and-eggs. And at St. Peter's the wind blew and the sun shone madly. Rapidly, purposefully, the Collegians marched in lines, crisscrossing the great square with black, like ants. In Mexico the dead man lay in a blue arcade; the dead volcanoes glistened like Easter lilies. Not only thematically (as in "The Fish") but structurally, these lines reject the order of "God's fingerprint"; St. Peter's is windblown, and its officials run like ants. These lines seem to run like ants as well, tumbling over one another with little sense of progression; but a tenuous order emerges when we notice throughout the passage an increasingly threatening sense of doom, culminating in these lines: "It was somewhere near there / I saw what frightened me most of all: / A holy grave, not looking particularly holy." Looking back over this movement of the poem, we can now see it was from the beginning a catalogue of frightening things—things as unsettling as the Tomb, Pit, and Sepulcher of the engravings. Bishop is not, by collapsing the opposition of the biblical order of the illustrations and the existential disorder of travel, implying that she would rather have the Bible than the ship—even though the end of the poem might seem to suggest that she does. Everything only connected by "and" and "and." Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.) Open the heavy book. Why couldn't we have seen this old Nativity while we were at it? —the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light, an undisturbed, unbreathing flame, colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw, and, lulled within, a family with pets, —and looked and looked our infant sight away. Returning to the book, Bishop realizes that order and randomness are not inherent in any form of experience (neither the illustrations nor the travels) but in the attitudes we bring to experience. As the Bible crumbles, the gilt rubbing from the pages and pollinating not only her fin-

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gertips but her imagination, she is able to reinterpret a Nativity scene (an idealized location of our origins) as something inconsequential, even mundane, and yet miraculous—not for its traditional connotations but for its mundanity; the implication is that she could have similarly remade any of the scenes described. At the end of the poem, the certainty of "God's fingerprint" has been replaced by the hope that we have "looked and looked our infant sight away." The end casts that revisionary glance over the beginning of the poem—and over a traditional image of our beginnings. To say, borrowing again the words of Bishop's discussion of Eliot, that "Over 2,000 Illustrations" reveals the "perpetually changing integration of what has been written with what is being written" is to recognize that the writing of this poem addresses not only itself but the history of Western culture. The final lines of Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" (published a year before "Over 2,000 Illustrations" in 1947) articulate the notion of historical understanding on which her poems, early and late, come to rest. Bishop speaks here of a sea so cold that, should you dip your hand in it, "your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn." It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. These lines offer a charged metaphor for the origins of knowledge, the rocky breasts, an image Bishop often associates with the Nova Scotia landscape where she lost her mother. At the same time, the lines caution that, like all metaphors, this one is made and therefore provisional— doubly so: "It is like what we imagine knowledge to be." The realization that "knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown" raises not only questions of poetic structure but questions of value. In "At the Fishhouses," Bishop links the Nova Scotia landscape with the female body but reminds us at the same time that the equation is historically contingent. In "Brazil, January 1, 1502," Bishop reveals what is at stake in forgetting the provisionality of that metaphor. The poem's title invokes the date on which Portuguese explorers named what they supposed, in error, to be the mouth of a great river—"Rio de Janeiro" or "River of January." The poem's epigraph, "embroidered nature... tapestried landscape," comes from a passage in Landscape into Art in which Kenneth Clark describes medieval depictions of the Hortus Conclusus, a garden enclosing the Virgin. The poem itself begins with the most neutral description of the landscape possible ("purple, yellow, two

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yellows, pink") but moves on to explain how the explorers' error was compounded by the imposition of European religious and sexual values on the Brazilian landscape. Charged metaphors accumulate quickly: a group of lizards "is Sin"; the moss unfolds in "hell-green flames"; and the smaller lizard, the "female one," is most threatening of all: "her wicked tail straight up and over, / red as a red-hot wire." Not until the third movement of the poem is it possible to charge the Portuguese with responsibility for these metaphors. In 1502 they found this landscape "not unfamiliar": no lovers' walks, no bowers, no cherries to be picked, no lute music, but corresponding, nevertheless, to an old dream of wealth and luxury already out of style when they left home— wealth, plus a brand-new pleasure. Directly after Mass, humming perhaps L'Homme arme or some such tune, they ripped away into the hanging fabric, each out to catch an Indian for himself— those maddening little women who kept calling, calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?) and retreating, always retreating, behind it. These final lines of the poem make explicit the oppressions implicit in the acts of describing (the metaphors) used to characterize the Brazilian landscape. But the poem is more than an unveiling of Portuguese colonialism; it is also a recognition of the possibility of Bishop's—or anyone's—complicity in the continuing imposition of those values. Like the other poems I've examined, "Brazil, January 1, 1502" unfolds coyly: Bishop strategically delays her characterization of Portuguese imperialism until the end of the poem, and only retrospectively does it seem responsible for the sexist metaphors. "Januaries, Nature greets our eyes / exactly as she must have greeted theirs," begins the poem. When we first read the lines, we're not sure who "they" are, and we might not take much notice of the traditional association of nature with femininity. Returning to these lines, we not only see the danger of that association, but we're forced to wonder who is making it. Bishop is keenly aware of the values imposed by sexual metaphors, but she suggests that awareness alone may not stop the perpetuation of the values; the metaphors accumulate a life of their own. Knowledge is certainly historical, flowing, and flown in "Brazil, January 1, 1502," but so, for better and for worse, is the knower. The date on which Bishop herself arrived in Brazil is appended to "Arrival at Santos," the poem which precedes "Brazil, January 1, 1502" in Questions of Travel: January 1952.

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If the prognosis for change in "Brazil, January 1, 1502" consequently seems dim, the poem should be compared with "Santarem," one of Bishop's final—and finest—efforts. "Santarem" recalls Bishop's trip down the Amazon to where it meets the Tapajos, but the narrative is wayward, a string of loosely connected observations, and the poem once again dramatizes the self-revising process of a mind thinking. Its opening line admits the possibility of error—"Of course I may be remembering it all wrong"—and the poem often shows the mind resisting its own mistakes: twice Bishop calls the cathedral a church and corrects herself, suggesting that the mind is stubborn, its will to wander difficult to control. In this way the mind mirrors the village of Santarem, where the two rivers converge: everything Bishop saw there was in motion, in flux, and the vagaries of thought raise this uncertain place to an even greater power of mutability. In "Brazil, January 1, 1502" the landscape had become a tapestry, a tissue of other people's descriptions, well before Bishop experienced it; in "Santarem" the landscape is not a static work of art but is like knowledge itself, flowing and flown, and Bishop shows the landscape resisting any human effort to contain it. Suddenly there'd been houses, people, and lots of mongrel riverboats skittering back and forth under a sky of gorgeous, under-lit clouds, with everything gilded, burnished along one side, and everything bright, cheerful, casual—or so it looked. I liked the place; I liked the idea of the place. Two rivers. Hadn't two rivers sprung from the Garden of Eden? No, that was four and they'd diverged. Here only two and coming together. Even if one were tempted to literary interpretations such as: life/death, right/wrong, male/female —such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight off in that watery, dazzling dialectic. Bishop calls the riverboats "mongrel," but the word could describe everything she recalls. Mixed of a variety of contrary qualities, Santarem resists all binary oppositions, all neatly resolving narratives. But since the poem itself is also in process, Bishop dramatizes first her desire to shape this place into a familiar narrative ("Hadn't two rivers sprung / from the Garden of Eden?") and then her rejection of the narrative's powerful surge toward closure. Eden seems to come to mind because Santarem seemed so idyllic: "everything bright, cheerful, casual—or so it looked," says Bishop, hinting that some more sinister aspects of the place may not yet be apparent.

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Halfway through "Santarem," Bishop begins the poem all over again, and those aspects begin to unfold. Two rivers full of crazy shipping—people all apparently changing their minds, embarking, disembarking, rowing clumsy dories. (After the Civil War some Southern families came here; here they could still own slaves. They left occasional blue eyes, English names, and oars. No other place, no one on all the Amazon's four thousand miles does anything but paddle.) The implication of those "mongrel" riverboats has become clearer. This place is no Eden but is in fact the same Brazilian landscape we encounter in "Brazil, January 1, 1502," a landscape built from a history of oppression—a landscape that Western invaders wanted to imagine as Eden. But in these lines Bishop suggests that the place and its people are stronger than the displaced Southerners. While some residue of their presence remains (names, blue eyes, even the useful oars) they have been incorporated into the "dazzling dialectic" of this place, diffused and disarmed. But not completely. The cathedral, evidence of even earlier invaders, is still standing, though precariously: having been struck by lightning, "One tower had / a widening zigzag crack all the way down." I think "Santarem" is one of Bishop's most daring poems because, unlike even "Over 2,000 Illustrations" or "Brazil, January 1, 1502," it does not end at all conclusively. Nothing in its nearly random agglutination of observations prepares us for this final anecdote—unless it is the blue of Southern eyes, the stucco walls of Santarem's houses, and the electricity of lightning. In the blue pharmacy the pharmacist had hung an empty wasps' nest from a shelf: small, exquisite, clean matte white, and hard as stucco. I admired it so much he gave it to me. Then—my ship's whistle blew. I couldn't stay. Back on board, a fellow-passenger, Mr. Swan, Dutch, the retiring head of Philips Electric, really a very nice old man, who wanted to see the Amazon before he died, asked, "What's that ugly thing?" In another poem, these final lines might seem crushingly ironic. Bishop teases us with the possibility of a stable irony (Mr. Swan doesn't ap-

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predate the beauty that Elizabeth Bishop and the reader can see), but she also leaves us with the uncomfortable notion that the poem, taken in its entirety, must be more complex than that. Linked to the rest of the poem metonymically, this final anecdote does not provide a metaphor that encompasses all of "Santarem," even though its prominent position at the end of the poem suggests that it might. The anecdote of the wasps' nest merely offers one memory among several others, and its irony cannot account for the poem at large: it offers just the kind of "literary" interpretation ("right/wrong") that the poem rejects. Similarly, if the wasps' nest itself functions as an emblem for what we value and retain from any place—an emblem for poetry itself—it is also an emblem of how much of the world poetry leaves out or leaves behind. "Santarem" both includes the anecdote of the wasps' nest and sloughs it off, unable to assimilate it into a complete pattern of meaning, just as the Brazilian landscape diffuses any effort, physical or ideological, to tame its wayward energies. I he Bishop who insists on the historicity of the structures of knowledge in this poem is not far, on the one hand, from the John Ashbery who admires her poems above all others, and not far, on the other hand, from the much younger Bishop who tried to describe, in the wake of modernism, new ways of writing novels and poems—not by rejecting T. S. Eliot's ideas of history but by adapting them to her own use. To say this is to leave one question unaddressed, however: though we can see that certain aspects of "Tradition and the Individual Talent" support the sense of history in "Over 2,000 Illustrations," "Brazil, January 1, 1502," or "Santarem," it is not easy to say that Eliot would agree with the revisionary attitude toward Western culture which, in Bishop's poems, that sense of history encourages. It would be even more difficult to say this about the Eliot whom Bishop interviewed in 1933—the Eliot who had just delivered the notoriously closed-minded Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, extending his earlier sense of tradition in a direction quite different from Bishop's. Reading American poetry, I've rejected a differentiation of the modern and the postmodern that depends on the artificial segregation of certain formal properties: equally unsatisfactory is a differentiation that depends on an artificial segregation of values. While it might be tempting to associate what we often think of as the "openness" of postmodern poetry with varieties of ideological "openness," my reading of Bishop's career suggests that there is no particular relationship between these formal and ideological characteristics. Bishop could build a poetic practice out of her reading of Eliot without adopting Eliot's values. This ability to reshape rather than reject Eliot is the dynamic (begin-

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ning with Crane) on which postmodernism in American poetry is often based. But in Bishop's particular case the dynamic was shaped by the social turmoil of the 1930s. In that decade, while Eliot was championed by New Critics but scorned by leftists, Bishop stood among a precarious group of writers and intellectuals who wanted both to retain their political values and revere Eliot. Her values have not always seemed clear because readers too often assume that a formal "breakthrough" must accompany any radical politics in poetry: Elizabeth Bishop's social conscience requires a different story.

T H R E E

ELIZABETH BISHOP'S SOCIAL CONSCIENCE

In "Contradictions: Tracking Poems," the long sequence that makes up the second half of Your Native Land, Your Life, Adrienne Rich meditates on Elizabeth Bishop's late villanelle, "One Art." acts of parting trying to let go without giving up yes Elizabeth a city here a village there a sister, comrade, cat and more no art to this but anger. "The art of losing isn't hard to master," Bishop said, and Rich's response to the line cuts two ways. On the one hand, she admires Bishop's artistry, feeling that she herself has not mastered the art—"only badlydone exercises." On the other hand, Rich is uncomfortable with Bishop's reticence, preferring the anger of the badly done to the artistry of a villanelle. Although Bishop has always been championed by male poets—from Jarrell and Lowell to Ashbery and Strand—she has (until recently) presented a difficult example to female poets, especially those of Rich's generation. In an essay on Bishop written around the same time as "Contradictions," Rich explained that for a long time she "felt drawn,

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but also repelled" by Bishop's poetry. "Miss" Bishop—that is, Bishop as she was "selected and certified" by Lowell—was part of the problem: "Elizabeth Bishop's name was spoken, her books reviewed with deep respect. But attention was paid to her triumphs, her perfections, not to her struggles for self-definition and her sense of difference. In this way, her reputation made her less, rather than more, available to me."1 Here, as in "Contradictions," Rich wants less art and more anger, and I sense that she is talking about her earlier self while addressing Bishop. In the 1950s the precocious Rich was also selected and certified by the literary establishment, and Bishop seemed to Rich the poet she could too easily become: the poet who was considered, in Robert Lowell's phrase, the author of "the best poems ... written by a woman in this century."2 Bishop herself despised that kind of praise, and she suffered under the reputation of "Miss" Bishop. "Most of my writing life I've been lucky about reviews," she admitted to George Starbuck. "But at the very end they often say 'The best poetry by a woman in this decade, or year, or month.' Well, what's that worth?" Bishop's feminism rarely seemed this pronounced or undivided. In the same interview she dismissed the "tract poetry" of feminist writers like Robin Morgan, and she insisted that she never made any distinction between male and female poets. But she also made this provocative remark: "I was in college in the days—it was the Depression, the end of the Depression—when a great many people were communist, or would-be communist.... I never gave feminism much thought, until. . ."3 Unfortunately, George Starbuck interrupted at this point. But the historical context that Bishop emphasizes for her early career—the 1930s— is pertinent to an understanding of her relationship to feminism. Living in Brazil, Bishop claimed that she was "much more interested in social problems and politics now" than she had been in the thirties.4 She even went so far as to attempt a poem about the suicide of Getulio Vargas, the elected president and former dictator of Brazil. But Bishop never completed "Suicide of a Moderate Dictator," her most overtly political poem; its progress was hampered by her long-standing distaste for what she called "tract poetry." Although Bishop considered herself "a 'Radical,' of course," she nevertheless wondered, apropos of Marianne Moore's sense of the "tentativeness" of her poetry, if the problem were her unwillingness to delineate a coherent political position within the poems.5 The stumbling block for Bishop, early and late, was not her values as such but her discomfort, nurtured in the thirties, with the conventions of political poetry. Bishop's values, especially her feminism, entered her poems in other ways. Characterizing her more recent rapprochement with Bishop, Rich remarks that "poems examining intimate relationships" are replaced in

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Bishop's work by "poems examining relationships between people who are, for reasons of inequality, distanced: rich and poor, landowner and tenant, white woman and Black woman, invader and native."6 I would alter this insight to say that poems emphasizing social inequality do not take the place of poems emphasizing sexuality; rather, for Bishop, the consideration of gender and sexuality grew to be inseparable from the consideration of nationality or race. Missing in Bishop's poetry is almost the complete domain of what she thought of as political poetry; but from the begining of her career, Bishop was "more interested in social problems" than, in retrospect, she would allow. Until 1934, Bishop was an undergraduate at Vassar College. She lived in New York City for the next few years, traveling widely, and then settled in Key West, Florida, just before the Second World War broke out. Her lifestyle, supported by a small trust fund and by occasional employment, was neither lavish nor uncomfortable, but many years later she would recall her experience of the "Marxist thirties." I was very aware of the Depression—some of my family were much affected by it. After all, anybody who went to New York and rode the Elevated could see that things were wrong. But I had lived with poor people and knew something of poverty at firsthand. About this time I took a walking-trip in Newfoundland and I saw much worse poverty there. I was all for being a socialist till I heard Norman Thomas [the Socialist Party presidential candidate in 1932] speak; but he was so dull. Then I tried anarchism, briefly.7 Bishop was, to be sure, someone who "rode the Elevated" and looked down on the social conditions of the Depression. And she was also someone who distrusted the easy proclamation of ideological associations and shifts—even in herself ("Then I tried anarchism, briefly"). But Bishop was aware of the conditions of the rural poor in Newfoundland and Key West, as well as in her native Nova Scotia. Even at Vassar she experienced the intellectual and political alternatives of the 1930s. Mary McCarthy, with whom Bishop established the alternative magazine Con Spirito, recalled the political climate of Vassar when she and Bishop were students there: "Most of our radicals were Socialists [rather than Communists], and throughout that election year they campaigned for Norman Thomas, holding parades and rallies.... Then our trustee, Franklin Roosevelt, was elected President. ... With the impetus of the New Deal and memories of the breadlines behind us, even we aesthetes began reading about Sacco and Vanzetti and Mooney."8 Like McCarthy, Bishop was more or less an "aesthete," but she was also reading about

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Sacco and Vanzetti. "Politically I considered myself a socialist," she remembered, "but I disliked 'social conscious' writing. I stood up for T. S. Eliot when everybody else was talking about James T. Farrell."9 Bishop may have stood apart, but she did not stand alone. Her sensibility finds its mirror during the thirties in Partisan Review, whose editors were, like Bishop, trying to maintain a left-wing concern with social conditions without diluting the literary values they had learned from modernism. While Granville Hicks of the New Masses maintained that the function of art is to "lead the proletarian reader to recognize his role in the class struggle," William Phillips and Philip Rahv said this in the opening editorial of Partisan Review: "We shall resist every attempt to cripple our literature by narrow-minded, sectarian theories and practices."10 Bishop would eventually publish many poems and stories in Partisan Review, but even her earliest work reveals her complicated relationship to the political and intellectual climate of the thirties. Her story "Then Came the Poor" describes a wealthy family's flight from communist rebels who have successfully overthrown the government: "My whole family might have been getting ready for a wonderful picnic or party," says the narrator, a disaffected son, who watches his parents and siblings attempt to pack their clothing, port, and even the dining-room chandelier in the car. The narrator decides to stay behind, and he wakes to find his house crawling with "reds." When they prepare a banquet on the lawn and invite the narrator to join them he feels "at home" for the first time.11 This conclusion suggests that only when the narrator overthrows his class origins may he feel "at home" in his own house. But there remains another aspect to the narrator's transgression. When he is subsumed into the mob, he rejects not only the upper-class privilege of his family but also its heterosexual structure. The crowd draws lots for rooms in the mansion, and the narrator offers to live with a man named Jacob Kaffir. "I caught Jacob's eye and smiled as hard as I could," he explains, and the story ends with Jacob accepting the proposition: " 'We'll have fun, huh?' he said, waving an empty bottle at me, and he gave me a wink I could almost hear." The sexual undertones of this passage become stronger when we recall a scene the narrator witnesses when he re-enters his house after the mob has overtaken it. From father's bathroom came howls of laughter, splashings, and slappings. I looked in and discovered two naked men jumping in and out of the shower and bath (all the water on full force), throwing powder and bathsalts at each other, and spitting shining spouts of water out the window into the sunshine and onto their amused friends below.

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This is the one passage in which the narrator drops his ironic tone and describes what he sees with something like wonder. Meeting Jacob Kaffir, the narrator is almost as amazed by the man's moustache, red fez, and skin the color of "a well-used penny": his proposition transgresses not only sexual but racial boundaries as well. Throughout "Then Came the Poor" these transgressions are encased within the more obvious drama of the transgression of class boundaries. At the same time, the story displays Bishop's divided attitude toward the idea of a "social conscious" writing. "Then Came the Poor" is a wicked parody of the wealthy sensibility Bishop knew well from her Boston grandparents, but it also pokes fun at the idea of a singlemindedly proletarian literature. While the story welcomes the revolution, it nevertheless "stands up for Eliot." Before the narrator's family flees, it receives this telegram: "REDS WIN DAY SULLIVAN AND KROWSKI SHOT THREE THOUSAND HEADED EAST VACATE OR OFFER NO

RESISTANCE ELIOT MAY HOLD." This joke—Eliot may hold—would have been clear to Mary McCarthy, if not to everyone. And today, the joke shows how Bishop's retrospective statement about her interest in social problems is and is not true: while "Then Came the Poor" does poke fun at the typical idea of "social conscious" writing (the narrator even remarks that his life has become "a silly story told by a propagandist"), the story is nevertheless deeply socially conscious in other ways. It was easier for the young Bishop to walk this thin line in her stories than in her poems. In 1937 she sent a poem called "War in Ethiopia" (now lost) to Horace Gregory, thinking that the anthology he was editing might be "all 'social consciousness.' " But Bishop was uncomfortable with her poem, adding that she was not sure if her "attempts at this kind of thing are much good." She didn't much admire other poets' attempts (Louis MacNeice's work seemed to her "shortsighted" and "ignorant"), but she did admire Owl's Clover, Wallace Stevens's sequence of poems about the role of poetic and political power in a time of economic depression. Whatever its flaws, Bishop told Marianne Moore, Owl's Clover was a wonderful "display of ideas at work—making poetry, the poetry making them, etc. That, it seems to me, is the way a poet should think, and it should be a lesson to his thicker-witted opponents and critics, who read or write all their ideas in bad prose and give nothing in the way of poetry except exhortation or bits of melancholy description."12 Stevens's sternly dialectical poem showed Bishop a way of harnessing her natural "tentativeness" (as Moore called it) in poems that grappled with the social questions of the thirties while avoiding the generic constraints of political poetry. Bishop was also guided by Moore's review of Owl's Clover; but while

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Moore felt that Owl's Clover was critical of the artistic attitudes it portrayed, Bishop thought it defended them (a disagreement that repeats a tension central to Stevens's poem): I am afraid my own idea of Owl's Clover is much more simple and "popular." I took it as a defense of his own position, and the statue—dear me—I felt, and still cannot help feeling, is ART— sometimes the particular creation, sometimes an historical synthesis, sometimes his own work—but always his own conception of such art. In the first section I thought he was confessing the "failure" of such art (I don't like to use these words but they seem to be the only ones) to reach the lives of the unhappiest people, and the possibility of a change—of something new arising from the unhappiness, etc.13 Bishop extended these thoughts in her notebook, following the entry with a pen and ink sketch of the artifact she would describe in "The Monument." This poem offers a work of art that unlike Stevens's statue can reach its audience, though not without some necessary difficulty. Like several of the poems of Owl's Clover, "The Monument" oscillates between two voices, one sympathetic and the other hostile to the abstract and ambiguous monument. "Why did you bring me here to see it? A temple of crates in cramped and crated scenery, what can it prove? I am tired of breathing this eroded air, this dryness in which the monument is cracking." It is an artifact of wood. Wood holds together better than sea or cloud or sand could by itself, much better than real sea or sand or cloud. It chose that way to grow and not to move. This defense of a "useless" artifact is a quintessential document of the thirties, the decade in which the kind of modernist abstraction exemplified by Bishop's monument first came under attack. Once again, Bishop is standing up for Eliot. Yet Bishop's monument differs from other artistic icons (Keats's urn, Yeats's golden bird, or even Stevens's humble jar in Tennessee) in that it is made of wood, organic and decaying. Though it is more lasting than sea or sand, it does not offer a refuge from reality. The monument is flawed, a little ridiculous, and undeniably human-made; its "crudest scroll-work says 'commemorate/ " suggesting that it is a monument to the potential grandeur of human folly and failure. Unlike "A Miracle for Breakfast" (which

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Bishop would later recall as a " 'social conscious' poem"14), "The Monument" is not so obviously marked as a poem of the thirties; but it asks more rigorous questions about the relevance of art and imagination to (in the words of Bishop's letter about Owl's Clover) "the lives of the unhappiest people." In contrast to "Then Came the Poor," "The Monument" doesn't show how the terms of gender and race may inflect those questions. But those terms became more consistently prominent in the poems Bishop began to write in Key West during the Second World War. In part, the reasons for this shift are cultural: the war emphasized differences between the social roles occupied by men and women, and, at the same time, helped to obscure the prominent class differences of the Depression by offering an enemy common to all Americans. So while "Roosters" is well-known as Bishop's war poem (Bishop said she was thinking "of those aerial views of dismal little towns in Finland and Norway, when the Germans took over"15), it is more precisely the poem's linkage of national and sexual aggression that marks it as a product of the Second World War. "Roosters" breaks into two halves, the first suggesting that the national aggression of war is essentially masculine. Cries galore come from the water-closet door, from the dropping-plastered henhouse floor, where in the blue blur their rustling wives admire, the roosters brace their cruel feet and glare with stupid eyes while from their beaks there rise the uncontrolled, traditional cries. After the roosters have fought to the death and the body is flung on the ash-heap "with his dead wives," the poem considers a second way to understand a rooster's significance. Rather than invoking masculine aggression (and feminine passivity as its complement), their crowing now recalls St. Peter, who was reminded of his denial by a rooster: " 'Deny deny deny' / is not all the roosters cry." By introducing the New Testament significance of roosters in the second movement of the poem, Bishop isn't suggesting that the roosters' cries are not emblematic of masculine aggression; rather, she suggests that this association is far from essential or unchangeable. Bishop asks her roosters, "what are you projecting?" but her poem makes us aware of what we project onto

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roosters: as emblems, the birds mean what we make them mean, and we are not doomed to war because of roosters or masculinity as such. At the end of the poem, when the sun rises "faithful as enemy, or friend," Bishop emphasizes the multiple significances of anything to which we grant meaning. The significance of Key West society, the subject of several other poems, didn't always seem so equivocal. While Bishop lived there, Key West suffered an economic depression severe even for the time. Because of political turmoil in Cuba, and later because of the world war, there was a large military presence; racial tensions ran high. In "Cootchie," a poem exploring the stunted intimacy that grew between two women divided by race and by class, the very landscape seems racially divided: when Cootchie dies, the skies are "egg-white for the funeral / and the faces sable"; her body "lies in marl, / black into white she went / below the surface of the coral reef." But in "Faustina" (named, like "Cootchie," for someone Bishop actually knew in Key West), these social divisions no longer seem so inevitable. This poem once again describes a relationship between two women that is also a relationship between servant and mistress, black and white. Everything in the old woman's room is "white" (her hair, the sheets, the clothes hung on chairs, even the bowl of farina Faustina brings to her), but the significance of this color seems far more equivocal than it does in "Cootchie." She bends above the other. Her sinister kind face presents a cruel black coincident conundrum. Oh, is it freedom at last, a lifelong dream of time and silence, dream of protection and rest? Or is it the very worst, the unimaginable nightmare that never before dared last more than a second? To Faustina, the old woman's white face is both actually and figuratively "the other." To the old woman, Faustina's face seems simultaneously sinister and kind—simultaneously an image of kindness and companionship (a "dream of protection and rest") and an image of sinister distrust ("the unimaginable nightmare"). And the questions Bishop asks arc unanswerable: "There is no way of telling. / The eyes say only either." Like Bishop's roosters, Faustina may be read in multiple ways:

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in terms of gender she is a companion, in terms of class a dependent, and in terms of race a potentially vindictive inferior.16 After settling in Brazil in 1951, Bishop saw even more clearly that these terms may be understood only in relation to one another. In Brazil, the book she wrote for the Life World Library, Bishop explained that "Brazilians have great pride in their fine record in race relations. Their attitude can best be described by saying that the upper-class Brazilian is usually proud of his racial tolerance, while the lower-class Brazilian is not aware of his—he just practices it."17 Because of the way her editors mangled her text, Bishop later dismissed this book, but some of her poems do present Brazil as the same kind of paradise of tolerated difference that this passage describes. In "Under the Window: Ouro Preto" Bishop describes the happy congregation of women around an ancient drinking fountain; she also celebrates her own relationship with a woman, for it was from Lilli Correia de Araujo's bedroom window that Bishop observed this scene. The conversations are simple: about food, or, "When my mother combs my hair it hurts." "Women." "Women!" Women in red dresses and plastic sandals, carrying their almost invisible babies—muffled to the eyes in all the heat—unwrap them, lower them, and give them drinks of water lovingly from dirty hands, here where there used to be a fountain, here where all the world still stops. A simple iron pipe has replaced the old, elaborate fountain (it's "in the museum"), but the water still draws these women together, past and present: "all have agreed for several centuries" that the water is "cold as ice." Soon the women are joined by an old man, a boy carrying laundry on his head, and two truck drivers; the gathering becomes sexually and racially mixed. The women's conversation crosses with the talk of men ("She's been in labor now two days." "Transistors / cost too much"), and the poem ends with an image of the truck's oil seeping into the fountain's standing water. But Bishop transforms this contamination into an emblem, beautiful and natural, for the mingling of differences: the water "flashes or looks upward brokenly, / like bits of mirror—no, more blue than that: / like tatters of the Morpho butterfly." The poem's final image invokes both morphology and Morpheus, the god of dreams, who has presided throughout this vision glimpsed below the bedroom window.

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Morpheus may be the more important reference, for in some moods Bishop wanted desperately to see Brazil as a kind of haven; she was self-conscious about recreating there an image of her lost Nova Scotian childhood. But Bishop often resisted this nostalgia too. While she praised Brazilian race relations in Brazil, she also recognized that prejudice continued to structure Brazilian society: "the 'poor' whites, Negroes and mulattoes" at "the bottom of the scale" are "treated with a combination of warmth and intimacy on the one hand, and an autocratic manner on the other." Women continued to exist somewhere below the bottom: "The double standard could scarcely be more taken for granted. . . . In this man's world, women are classified as 'the mother of my children' or 'the bearer of my name.' "18 Other poems about Brazil reflect this awareness: "Going to the Bakery" almost seems like a rewriting of "Under the Window" in more sordid terms. Here the people gathering near a bakery (a childish whore who dances feverishly, a black beggar with a phoney wound on his side) emphasize the divisions of Brazilian culture. The baker himself is "sickly," and the "gooey tarts are red and sore"; the "loaves of bread / lie like yellow-fever victims / laid out in a crowded ward." There is no conversation here; the people congregate around the bakery but they do not meet. The poem does end with an effort at communication with the beggar—"I give him seven cents in my I terrific money, say 'Good night' / from force of habit"—but the exchange merely emphasizes cultural and racial difference. Throughout "Going to the Bakery" the speaker has stood apart from the scene's sordidness; in these final lines, Bishop recognizes her complicity (the complicity of the American tourist) in the perpetuation of Brazil's divided culture. Some of Bishop's poems avoid that recognition; her note to "Manuelzinho" specifies that "a friend of the writer is speaking"—as if Bishop were afraid that the poem's exasperation with a servant would be mistaken for her own. In comparison, "Going to the Bakery" seems both more honest and more interesting. Richer still is "Brazil, January 1, 1502," in which (as I've already suggested) Bishop harnesses the confusion between herself and her subject to suggest that no matter how self-conscious she might be about social injustice, she nevertheless remains implicated in its perpetuation. It would be wrong, as Barbara Page has pointed out, to maintain that Bishop aligns herself in this poem with "aggressive masculinity and with intending rapists."19 But it would not quite be right to suggest that Bishop, always conscious of her status as an outsider, aligns herself clearly with the retreating Indian women: while as an exposer of racism and sexism she sympathizes with these women, she nevertheless recognizes that her own discovery of Brazilian culture may be shaped by the social codes of the conquistadors. As in

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"Roosters," Bishop suggests that no particular values are essential to any place or people; but in "Brazil, January 1, 1502" that realization seems far less liberating. It initially seems even less liberating in "In the Waiting Room," a poem that shows how the very idea of selfhood is predicated on racial and sexual codes. Throughout this late poem there is a strong sense of the world's violence, natural and contrived: outside of the dentist's waiting room is the hard Massachusetts winter and the First World War. Bishop's date for the experience of the poem (February 5, 1918) points to an additional, more threatening aspect to the world outside. In Bishop's native Nova Scotia, on December 6, 1917, a munitions ship laden with eight million tons of dynamite collided with another vessel and exploded. This was the world's most powerful man-made explosion prior to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and many thousands of people were killed or injured. Over half of Halifax was flattened. Since Bishop had been taken by her grandparents to live in Massachusetts only weeks before, it must have seemed to her as if her lost Nova Scotia was destroyed. This event does not appear in the poem (though Bishop's drafts show that she originally gave much more space to the image of the exploding volcano); but our knowledge of it helps us to see why Bishop would have thought of the "outside" world as such an extraordinarily threatening place. And I think it's important to feel the strength of that threat, because the poem's greater horror turns on the realization that there is no "inside" world safe from this exterior violence—not the warmth of the waiting room, not the security of the individual consciousness. While Aunt Consuelo sees the dentist, the child reads the National Geographic, and though its images are meant to showcase a Western mastery of "primitive" culture, the child finds each image more threatening than the one before it: black, naked women with necks wound round and round with wire like the necks of light bulbs. Their breasts were horrifying. It is at this point that the child hears an exclamation of pain "from inside," and though she recognizes her aunt's voice (inside the dentist's office), the child herself could be speaking (the sound coming "from inside" of her): in either case, the child recognizes another person's voice as her own, just as she recognizes her own destiny in the racial and sexual otherness of the African women. Any sense of a world "inside," clearly differentiated from other cultures and people, collapses.

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MODERN POETRY AFTER MODERNISM But I felt: you are an /, you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them. Why should you be one, too?

The child is learning that whatever sense of selfhood she possesses is a precarious social construction—that she has in fact never been "inside," separated from the violence of war, the trauma of adult sexuality, or what she had been taught to think of as the cultural practices of "primitive" peoples. Bishop's repeated use of the word "inside" emphasizes this point: if, at the beginning of the poem, Aunt Consuelo is "inside" the dentist's office, then the child has been "outside" from the start; if the "inside" of a volcano is full of ash and fire, then it is not different from the violent world "outside." An erupting volcano is itself an image of the breakdown of the barrier between inside and outside, and, as Bonnie Costello has shown, Bishop's early drafts reveal that she equated the unstable interior spaces of the volcano, the waiting room, and the self: "Had a family voice misled me / into a crater of ashes / among Ten Thousand Smokes?"20 In the final lines of the poem, the waiting room has understandably become "too hot": it is no longer a safe haven but a place of discomfort. But the child's recognition of a world "outside" is finally not a threat but a welcome certainty. The War was on. Outside, in Worcester, Massachusetts, were night and slush and cold, and it was still the fifth of February, 1918. The experience "In the Waiting Room" commemorates is initially traumatic, but the poem ends calmly, recognizing that the racially and sexually charged image of "those awful hanging breasts" does not pose a threat to selfhood but offers the very terms in which the self, however fragile, is constituted: this is simply the nature of selfhood. To see, with Bishop, that the self's contingency is also its strength is to suggest that what begins as a poem of dissolution ends, at least potentially, as a poem of empowerment. "In the Waiting Room" is well known as perhaps Bishop's most explicitly personal poem; some readers, bolstered by Bishop's unpublished poems, have wanted to see it as a kind of "breakthrough." The poem's representation of sexuality seems less unique once we recognize the complicated ways in which sexuality and race enter much of Bishop's work, beginning with "Then Came the Poor." While Bishop's career is

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not static, it is not marked by an abrupt turn in the way that Rich's career is. Bishop did not begin writing with an attenuated conception of poetry as impersonal, apolitical, or closed, and she never had to make exaggerated gestures toward the personal and the open in order to express her values. I think that Bishop's formal idiosyncrasy (her desire to bend traditional poetic forms without breaking them) accounts for the fact that some of Bishop's admirers lament the lack of greater frankness in the poems. In Lowell's mind, male poets were better equipped to overthrow poetic convention and achieve the formal "breakthrough": "Few women write major poetry."21 But women poets of Rich's generation sometimes politicized the breakthrough as well: after her own conversion to free verse, Rich considered traditional poetic forms to be "asbestos gloves"—something that might be necessary to a poet early on but which must ultimately be discarded for the "barehanded" treatment of more immediate experience.22 Rich and Lowell would not have agreed on what the value of experience was, but each of them implied that poetic form can be an impediment to the proper values—something that needs to be "broken through." Rebelling against the "tranquillized Fifties," they made free verse seem as if it had something to do with other kinds of freedom. In contrast, Bishop was comfortable (as "In the Waiting Room" suggests) with the idea that poems cannot break through their linguistic fabric, just as the self cannot be separated from the social codes from which it's made. In their less polemical moments, Lowell and Rich were comfortable with this idea too; Rich elsewhere acknowledges the necessity of struggling within language, even as "the words / get thick with unmeaning."23 But the common reduction of political valence to poetic form has made Bishop (who understood that all poetry offers some kind of rhetorical screen) seem apolitical. The judgment has more to do with her formal qualities as such than with the values expressed by her poems. During the fifties, Bishop was of course living in a country that unlike the United States seemed anything but tranquil. In an essay about Rio de Janeiro, she made these comments about the "compensations" of living in such a politically and economically volatile place. Recently a large advertisement showed a young Negro cook, overcome by her pleasure in having a new gas stove, leaning across it toward her white mistress, who leaned over from her side of the stove as they kissed each other on the cheek. Granted that the situation is not Utopian, socially speaking, and that the advertisement is silly—but could it have appeared on billboards, or in the newspapers, in Atlanta, Ga., or even in New

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Bishop made herself vulnerable here, for despite her admission that the billboard is not "Utopian," she was attacked by a Brazilian journalist for her outsider's view of racial tolerance. But I think that what Bishop admired in this image was much closer to her experience than the journalist could see. While Bishop does emphasize Rio's relative freedom from prejudices that permeated Atlanta during the civil rights movement, she is describing a transgression of the social boundaries of gender and class as well as race: the three transgressions seem indistinguishable. Perhaps even more than any of the poems I've examined, this passage seems to me closest to Bishop's sensibility: more idealistic than "Going to the Bakery" (but not as Utopian as "Under the Window"), it offers an image of the freedoms Bishop yearned for and too rarely found—freedoms that were ultimately, as "One Art" explains with painful reticence, lost to her.

F O U R

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s a boy, Randall Jarrell posed for the statue of Ganymede, loved by Zeus, adorning the replica of the Parthenon in Nashville's Centennial Park. Jarrell's adult friends were bemused by this anecdote, for it seemed almost too appropriate to their idea of Jarrell's sensibility: over and over again their memoirs return, more or less uncomfortably, to Jarrell's lack of manly virtues. Berryman remembered that Jarrell once had a hangover brought on by a poisoned canape: "He's the only poet that I've ever known in the universe who simply did not drink." Robert Watson (Jarrell's colleague at Greensboro) remembered that neither did Jarrell smoke, use profanity, or enjoy jokes about sex. To Robert Lowell, consequently, Jarrell never quite seemed one of the boys: "one felt, beside him, too corrupt and companionable."1 Jarrell himself would not have denied these characterizations; teaching at Princeton, he complained openly about the "improper subjects" that marred conversations with his male colleagues. But Jarrell wasn't simply a prude. He took considerable delight in his transgressions of typically masculine behavior. Robert Fitzgerald remembered him as "one of the few men I have known who chortled. He really did. 'Baby doll!' he would cry, and his voice simply rose and broke in joy."2 These 49

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exclamations were spontaneous, but they were not unself-conscious, at least after Jarrell had known Berryman, Lowell, and Fitzgerald for many years. A man who writes his publisher that he's coming into New York on the "choo-choo" is making practiced fun of professional solemnity. So is the newly bearded poet who says this to Robert Penn Warren, his old teacher: "When I look in the mirror it's just as if the fairies had stolen me away."3 There's not only something appropriate but something lovely in the fact that Jarrell's first encounter with high art was posing as Ganymede. But if Jarrell's friends were sometimes uncomfortable with this sensibility, his detractors were unsympathetic. The New York Times reviewer of The Lost World was downright mean, calling Jarrell's poems— among other things—corny, cute, folksy, infantile, pathetic, selfindulgent, sentimental, and tear-jerking. Jarrell was understandably upset by this notice (friends speculated that it contributed to the depression preceding his death), but he couldn't have been surprised, since these adjectives had been used for years to describe his poems (only not so many at once). Part of what Jarrell's male readers were complaining about was his repeated Use of female speakers. And his female readers weren't fully convinced by these voices either: Elizabeth Bishop complained about "his understanding and sort-of-oversympathizing with the lot of women."4 As a more recent critic of both Jarrell's and Berryman's representations of female consciousness has said, "it is finally a narrow view of the feminine that he gives voice to."5 Unlike Berryman, however, Jarrell was not so much interested in prescribing a voice for women as developing a socially respectable way of coming to terms with his own divided sensibility. As a critic, Jarrell was certainly comfortable with the professional man's world of hardnosed reviewing (this may account, at least in part, for the common opinion that Jarrell's criticism is superior to his poetry). But the aggressive stance of his essays often seems defensive—a strategy that bolsters his ostensibly masculine credentials while allowing him to occupy a more marginalized position in his poems. Bishop once remarked to Lowell that Jarrell's women "seem to be like none I—or you—know,"6 and she was right: the female speakers of Jarrell's poems are closer to a man who doesn't drink or participate in locker-room banter but who likes to read fairy tales and shout "Baby doll!" Even if a compelling explanation of Jarrell's female personae could be mounted, the question of Jarrell's style (which also seemed feminine to many readers) would still remain. Close friends found Jarrell's poems formally wayward or—Allen Tate's word—limp. But just as Jarrell knew what he was doing when he cried "Peachy!" in the Princeton

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faculty club, he understood the implications of avoiding certain modernist tenets of good writing. As Langdon Hammer has suggested in an important reevaluation of Jarrell, the "manifest excesses" of his poetry are "evidence of his dissatisfaction with the boundaries within which he was obliged to work."7 Early in his career, Jarrell set out to write poems that would not always be well read through the lens of Tate's version of modernism. The results were poems that to an eye trained to look for irony seemed sentimental—poems that to Allen Tate seemed feminine. Jarrell was able to capitalize on this impression. "I like your poetry better than anybody's since the Frost-Stevens-Eliot-Moore generation," he told Elizabeth Bishop, "so I looked with awed wonder at some phrases feeling to me a little like some of my phrases, in your poems; I felt as if, so to speak, some of my wash-cloths were part of a Modigliani collage, or as if my cat had got into a Vuillard."8 Bishop was the contemporary poet to whom Jarrell felt closest. Despite her sense of the limitations of his female personae, Jarrell found not only his words but his life uncannily reflected in her poems. And while Jarrell's own poems don't often resemble Bishop's, they do exemplify Bishop's stylistic ideal of "a mind thinking" rather than a finished thought. Jarrell associated that ideal, as Bishop did not, with certain notions of femininity. But unlike Bishop, whom Tate or Lowell never expected to write "like a man," Jarrell had to defend his stylistic choices. Just as a woman's voice allowed him to dramatize himself more openly, it also allowed him to publish poems that rubbed against the kind of modernism he learned from Tate, Ransom, and Warren. For Jarrell, the dramatization of a feminine sensibility became inseparable from the exploration of what might be possible in American poetry at the end of the line. During his freshman year at Vanderbilt (1932-33), Jarrell was assigned to classes with both John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren. Four years later, he and the slightly younger Lowell migrated to Kenyon College, continuing their studies with Ransom and Tate. Before he completed his M.A., Jarrell's poems appeared in the American Review (edited by Tate), the Kenyon Review (edited by Ransom), and the Southern Review (edited by Warren). But almost from the start Jarrell's teachers recognized that they had an uneasy disciple on their hands. "I like to talk shop, and aesthetics more or less is," said Jarrell, "politics and freeing the slaves not much."9 Jarrell's politics kept him distant from Agrarian aesthetics as well. His early Marxism, fueled by Auden, gave him a more supple sense of poetry's historicity ("A poem, today, is both an aesthetic object and a commodity"), and his keen sense of the complexity of Tate's classicism allowed him to learn openly from his romantic

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and Victorian predecessors: "the best modern criticism of poetry is extremely anti-romantic, and the change in theory covers up the lack of any essential change in practice."10 While he questioned his teachers, Jarrell didn't want his opinions to eclipse theirs entirely. He never lost respect for the rigor of Tate's formalism. And he always insisted that Tate and Blackmur (as well as Kenneth Burke and Edmund Wilson) wrote the best criticism of his time. But Jarrell's loyalty was never confused with dogmatism. When Margaret Marshall asked him to take her place as literary editor of the Nation, Jarrell thought himself worthy of the job precisely because he wasn't associated with "any particular variety of literary opinion." Thinking of the Kenyon and Southern reviews, he explained that several of his friends were editors: "their dogmatic convictions and idiosyncrasies and general sectarian leanings hurt their work a lot."11 Jarrell meant to criticize the editorial decisions of Ransom and Warren, but he might as well have been discussing Warren's poems— though not Ransom's, with which Jarrell did feel some affinity: "To expect Tate's and Warren's poems to be much influenced by Ransom's is like expecting two nightmares to be influenced by a daydream."12 Two nightmares: what bothered Jarrell most about Warren and Tate was their delight in violence and evil—a sensibility that Jarrell knew was deeply romantic, despite any gestures toward antiromantic classicism. Tate's poems about the Second World War especially troubled Jarrell: "violence is to him, perhaps unconsciously, an intrinsic good," he told Lowell. His criticism of Warren's 1944 Selected Poems suggested the political dangers of this aesthetic position: "[T]he only excuse you can find for doing nothing is to say that the world is essentially evil and incurable, that anything you did would only be a silly palliation to hide from yourself the final evil of existence; and so you believe in Original Sin, and dislike progress, science, and humanitarianism, and go in for religion and the Middle Ages, and so-on."13 Ultimately, for Jarrell, this fascination with evil allowed Warren to avoid responsibility for the world's condition, however engaged with the social problems of the American South Warren's poems may have been. Jarrell would sometimes be accused of maintaining too rosy an outlook on the modern world; but it was the dominance of Warren's sense of modernity's essential horror (present, Jarrell said, in the work of "thousands of others") that eventually made Jarrell's position seem sentimental. To save Jarrell from this fate, some of his admirers have tried to grant him the prestige associated with Lowell's or Berryman's public agonies, insisting that Jarrell's death was a suicide. Helen Vendler has more sensibly wondered if Jarrell, after being separated from his beloved paternal grandparents, became a chronically depressed child:

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"One could read the life . . . as a desperate one, heroic in its struggle against emptiness, as though a drowning man were to come up for air a hundred times rather than thrice."14 Like most people, Jarrell was not unacquainted with suffering; but his lifelong effort to portray "difficult ordinary happiness" (a phrase he admired in Adrienne Rich's poetry) was fueled by his sense of the danger, so carefully avoided by Bishop, of idealixing human suffering. Even when Jarrell was a student, he developed remarkably prescient terms to describe his distance from Tate's sensibility. In a 1939 letter he explained why he didn't feel any "abyss" of modern uncertainty opening up beneath him: "I think all in all I've got a poetic and semifeminine mind, I don't put any real faith in abstractions or systems; I never had any certainties, religious or metaphysical, to lose, so I don't feel their lack."15 Here Jarrell is relying, as Bishop would later point out, on a sexist idea of femininity (one that equates it with amorphous physicality and uncertainty), but he is freely offering to Tate the terms in which his own poems would be discussed for many years to come. The difference is that Tate would never use the word "feminine" in anything but a derogatory sense; Jarrell, in contrast, welcomes the appellation. The Rage for the Lost Penny, Jarrell's first collection of poems, appeared in 1940 as part of a New Directions gathering of Five Young American Poets. When Tate offered the first of several uncomfortable criticisms of the "limpness" of the poems, Jarrell responded that the effect was intentional: "it's an occupational risk, a defect of quality. In other words, I'd rather seem limp and prosaic than false and rhetorical."16 "A Story," which opens with these lines, was probably the object of Tate's censure. Even from the train the hill looked empty. When I unpacked I heard my mother say: "Remember to change your stockings every day— Socks, I mean." I went on walking past their Buildings gloomy with no lights or boys Into the country where the roads were lost. This is the only poem from The Rage for the Lost Penny that Jarrell would include in his Selected Poems (half of "For an Emigrant" was also included, though heavily revised). And it is the only poem in which we can feel the presence of Jarrell's later fascination with the fragile state of childhood domesticity. If "A Story" consequently seemed limp and prosaic, it was in contrast to far more rhetorical lines like these, from "The Machine-Gun." Our times lie in the welded hands, Our fortune in the rubber face—

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MODERN POETRY AFTER MODERNISM On the gunner's tripod, black with oil, Spits and gapes the pythoness.

Some of Jarrell's earliest poems do veer closely to his teachers' apocalyptic sensibility (associated here, not coincidentally, with a threatening vision of femininity—the gaping pythoness): it was this side of the early Jarrell of which Tate approved. Even as late as 1985 Warren would say that some of Jarrell's best poems were written while Jarrell was still a student. But the attitude of those poems was learned behavior for Jarrell (his contemporaneous letters don't show it at all). Reading Tate's or Warren's recollections of Jarrell, one has the impression that they saw him as they saw Hart Crane: the prodigiously talented young poet who never equaled his earliest successes, in part because of his suspicious sexuality. The year after The Rage for the Lost Penny appeared, Edmund Wilson accepted a half dozen of Jarrell's poems for the New Republic: once again Tate expressed discomfort with some of their lines. The subsequently well-known "90 North" compares a childhood fantasy of discovering the North Pole with the adult realization of the meaninglessness of discovery. For the adult, there is nowhere to go but backwards; all steps are to the South. For the child, every night offers a new discovery. In the child's bed After the night's voyage, in that warm world Where people work and suffer for the end That crowns the pain—in that Cloud-Cuckoo-Land I reached my North and it had meaning. Tate wanted Jarrell to cut the first four of these lines, presumably because he once again found them limp and sentimental in contrast to the adult's confrontation with meaninglessness. The poem ends with lines much closer to Tate's sensibility ("Pain comes from the darkness / And we call it wisdom. It is pain"). But as William Pritchard has pointed out, "90 North" differs from Jarrell's earlier apocalyptic poems in that it "enacts its discovery of the world as pain within the poem, instead of laying it on from outside." Jarrell's childhood fantasy is essential to the process; he conceded to Tate that "the stanza may be bad" but assured him that "it's impossible just to remove it."17 I doubt that Jarrell thought the stanza was bad, however, since its idealization of childhood once again foreshadows the preoccupations of his fully mature poems. But I suspect that Tate's continuing criticism helped to persuade Jarrell to cast his dramatizations of the "semifeminine" mind in a different form: "The Christmas Roses," published in the New Republic a few months after "90 North," is the first poem Jarrell

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wrote in a woman's voice. Compared to other poems Jarrell wrote at the same time, there's nothing about the content of "The Christmas Roses" that particularly demands a female speaker; a dying woman speaks to her former lover from a hospital bed. But in "The Christmas Roses" Jarrell's idea of femininity is crucially different from his vision of the gaping pythoness; it is much closer to his poems of childhood vulnerability. While Jarrell wrote poems about childhood from the very start of his career, his adoption of female personae came somewhat later: it was a strategy that allowed Jarrell to dramatize his own sensibility more fully. Mary Jarrell would call these poems "semi-self portraits." And she would remember that on at least one other occasion Jarrell wrote a poem in his own voice before changing it to a woman's: in "The Face" he simply replaced the word "handsome" with "beautiful" and added an epigraph from Strauss's Rosenkavalier, associating the poem with the Marschallin's lament over her aging face.18 Jarrell must have suspected that Tate (or almost anyone else) wouldn't know how to read the overwrought final lines of "The Christmas Roses." Come to me! Come to me! . . . How can I die without you? Touch me and I won't die, I'll look at you And I won't die, I'll look at you, I'll look at you. These lines came to Jarrell naturally (like his cries of "Baby doll!"), but he was canny as well as sincere, aware that he "was writing in an age in which the most natural feeling of tenderness, happiness, or sorrow was likely to be called sentimental." Jarrell made this comment apropos of Ransom, who, he went on to say, "needed a self-protective rhetoric as the most brutal or violent of poets did not." Jarrell's "Christmas Roses" needed protection as well. He told the more violent Tate that the poem "is supposed to be said (like a speech from a play) with expression, emotion, and long pauses. It of course needs a girl to do it. I can do it pretty well for myself, to anybody I get embarrassed."19 This explanation of "The Christmas Roses" is especially revealing of Jarrell's general predicament: given that he found his own sensibility "semifeminine" in contrast to Tate's glorification of the abyss, all of Jarrell's poems needed, as it were, a girl to do them. And since Jarrell was embarrassed by the sound of his own girlish voice, he enlisted female personae to speak for him. It was around the time he wrote "The Christmas Roses" that Jarrell also wrote his own epitaph in "To Be Dead," a poem that remained unpublished until after his death: " 'Woman,' men say of him, and women, 'Man.' " It was also at this time that Jarrell was drafting "The End of the Line," his declaration of independence from the antiromantic modern-

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ism he had absorbed at Vanderbilt and Kenyon. The contiguity of these efforts suggests that Jarrell was trying self-consciously to write poems that wouldn't reflect Agrarian values—poems that were at least in this limited sense "postmodern." I mentioned in chapter 1 that for a brief time Auden offered an important example to Jarrell; by 1946 Lowell seemed to Jarrell the legitimately postmodern poet. And while Jarrell did try to write like Auden, he was not influenced by Lord Weary's Castle, even as he helped to canonize it as the decade's most important book of poems. Much modern poetry seemed to Jarrell primarily negative in impulse: it "rejects a great deal, accepts a little, and is embarrassed by that little."20 Writing poems like "The Christmas Roses," Jarrell wanted to risk even more embarrassment by including a wider range of human emotion. Lowell wasn't embarrassed enough, and Jarrell helped to make his friend's poems more encompassing, more forgiving. Corresponding about the manuscript of Lord Weary's Castle, the agnostic Jarrell found Lowell's explanations of Christianity "humane and sympathetic" but was dismayed that there was "almost no indication of this attractive Christian attitude" in the fire-breathing poems. Lowell's early poems too often seemed to Jarrell (to borrow the phrase he used to criticize his own work) "false and rhetorical" in their savoring of evil and damnation.21 Jarrell consequently helped Lowell to change the ending of "After the Surprising Conversions" from this— The multitude, once unconcerned with doubt, Once neither callous, curious, nor devout, Starts at broad noon, as though some peddler whined At it in its familiar twang: "My friend, Come, come, my generous friend, cut your throat. Now; 'Tis a good opportunity. Now! Now!" —to this, the version Lowell would publish in Lord Weary's Castle: The multitude, once unconcerned with doubt, Once neither callous, curious nor devout, Jumped at broad noon, as though some peddler groaned At it in its familiar twang, "My friend, Cut your own throat. Cut your own throat. Now! Now!" September twenty-second, Sir, the bough Cracks with the unpicked apples, and at dawn The small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn. As Bruce Michaelson has shown, all that Jarrell did to provoke this revision (much like Pound, editing The Waste Land) was to criticize the diction, rhythm, and metrics of the earlier version.22 His motive was to

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soften Lowell's tendency to emulate his teachers' delight in violence: having altered the earlier lines, casting the speech in the past tense, Lowell realized that the poem could end with an image of natural continuity rather than apocalyptic horror. Its last three lines comprise one of the earliest manifestations of what Seamus Heaney has called Lowell's "less assertive voice," the voice that would distinguish many of the poems of For the Union Dead.23 An even more revealing response to Lowell came in "The End of the Rainbow," first published in 1954 and later included in The Woman at the Washington Zoo. Lord Weary's Castle ends with "Where the Rainbow Ends," Lowell's apocalyptic vision of Puritan Boston: "I saw the sky descending, black and white, / Not blue, on Boston." Jarrell's much longer poem traces the thoughts of a female painter (named "Content") who has moved from Massachusetts to Southern California. She hasn't been able to abandon her heritage completely; among her possessions are pieces of Pilgrim Rock, a copy of Emerson's Compensation, and a miniature of her great-great-great-grandfather, "pressed to death in Salem / For a wizard." Content is aging, lonely, and obsessed with the ghosts of her past. Like Lowell, she almost sees the sky descending, "black and white": She looks around her: Many waves are breaking on many shores, The wind turns over, absently, The leaves of a hundred thousand trees. How many colors, squeezed from how many tubes In patient iteration, have made up the world She draws closer, like a patchwork quilt, To warm her, all the warm, long, summer day! The local colors fade: She hangs here on the verge of seeing In black and white, And turns with an accustomed gesture To the easel, saying: "Without my paintings I would be— why, whatever would I be?" This turn from potential nightmare to the saving routine of daily life is quintessential Jarrell: not paintings, not even the act of painting, but the act of turning to the easel saves her, and the gesture is so much a part of her daily life that she can't imagine her existence without it. Her realization is almost empty of meaning ("whatever would I be?"), but it is crucial to the continuity of her life. The realization also underwrites the poem's structure. "The End of the Rainbow" is typical of Jarrell's mature work in that it follows the

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turns and digressions of meditation, avoiding a clear sense of an ending or even of accumulated significance. And though the meditation is a woman's, Jarrell invites us to see "The End of the Rainbow" as a record of his own thoughts. If you look at a picture the wrong way You see yourself instead. —The wrong way? Content looks at the glass covering her painting and sees herself in her own work. This is not the "wrong" way to view the painting or to read the poem: Jarrell suggests that he may similarly be found in what he has made. "The End of the Rainbow" focuses on a woman because Jarrell associated its healthy acquiescence with femininity, just as he associated Lowell's apocalyptic tendencies with masculinity. Explaining what troubled him about the heroine of "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," Jarrell said, "You feel, 'Yes, Robert Lowell would act like this if he were a girl'; but whoever saw a girl like Robert Lowell?"24 At the same time that he was reading Lord Weary's Castle, Jarrell saw himself in the poems of a particular woman. In this passage from his review of Elizabeth Bishop's North & South (which appeared shortly before the review of Lord Weary's Castle), Jarrell seems to be describing the ideals of his own poems. Instead of crying, with justice, "This is a world in which no one can get along," Miss Bishop's poems show that it is barely but perfectly possible—has been, that is, for her. Her work is unusually personal and honest in its wit, perception, and sensitivity—and in its restrictions too; all her poems have written underneath, I have seen it. She is morally so attractive, in poems like "The Fish" or "Roosters," because she understands so well that the wickedness and confusion of the age can explain and extenuate other people's wickedness and confusion, but not, for you, your own; that morality, for the individual, is usually a small, personal, statistical, but heartbreaking or heart-warming affair of omissions and commissions the greatest of which will seem infinitesimal, ludicrously beneath notice, to those who govern, rationalize, and deplore. For Jarrell, Bishop's poems offered a powerful corrective to the idealization of violence he found in Warren, Tate, Lowell, and "thousands of others." "It is odd how pleasant and sympathetic her poems are," he continued, "in these days when many a poet had rather walk down children like Mr. Hyde than weep over them like Swinburne, and when many a poem is gruesome occupational therapy for a poet who stays legally innocuous by means of it."25 In his own poems, Jarrell preferred

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to weep, even if he gave readers like Tate the chance of finding his poems sentimental. Bishop herself never weeps, but she never rails against the world's evil, exempting herself from responsibility to that world—keeping herself "legally innocuous." The other words Jarrell uses to praise Bishop's work (sympathetic, personal, honest, sensitive, moral, heartbreaking) describe qualities Jarrell sought in his own. "Your poems seem really about real life," he told Bishop with calculated naivete, "and to have as much of what's nice and beautiful and loving about the world as the world lets them have." Jarrell used these grand terms (life, beautiful, loving) intentionally; they allowed him to describe the mysterious ways in which the formal qualities of Bishop's poems, in contrast to Moore's, made them seem like a part of human life, rather than an artistic record of it: "I've quite got to like your poems better than Marianne Moore's as much as I do like hers—but life beats art, so to speak, and sense beats eccentricity, and the way things really are beats the most beautiful unreal visions, half-truths, one can fix up by leaving out and indulging oneself."26 Jarrell admired exactly what Bishop tried hardest to capture in her poems: the process of thinking, rather than the completed thought—a formal structure that eschewed the contours of the well-wrought urn for a more wayward and self-questioning kind of poetry. "We think of the structure of poetry too much in static terms," said Jarrell in a lecture he delivered at Princeton in 1942: "But the poem is completely temporal, about as static as an explosion."27 It would not be exactly right to say that Bishop was a crucial influence on Jarrell's poems; by the late forties his sensibility was fully formed. But as his letters to Bishop suggest, Jarrell thought that his mind was uncannily similar to hers: "It's a feeling I never have with anybody else," he told her, ". . . It's as if you were a color I see so easily I hardly have to look."28 Bishop's work provided him with a compelling example of his own aesthetic goals (one that he could write about more gracefully than he could write about himself), and in his review of North & South Jarrell easily enlists Bishop in his effort to undermine his teachers' values. In this regard, Bishop was especially useful to Jarrell because her poems did not overthrow those values completely. During the 1940s and 50s Jarrell would write appreciations of poets (Williams and Whitman most prominently) whose sensibility was far more capacious than Bishop's. Just as he never tried to write like Lowell, however, he never tried to write like Williams either. Poems like "A Game at Salzburg," "The End of the Rainbow," or "The Night Before the Night Before Christmas" are loosened up in the way that Bishop's "bramble bushes" are; they retain an amount of formal clarity even as they trace the temporal process of a mind thinking.

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Like Bishop's career, consequently, Jarrell's reveals a gradual development rather than a "breakthrough" to unprecedented formal or autobiographical openness. The early books offer suggestions of Jarrell's mature sensibility, and in The Seven-League Crutches, published in 1951, Jarrell perfected the formal strategies that would sustain his work until the end of his life. Reviewing the volume, Lowell praised "A Game at Salzburg" in terms that recall Bishop's way of talking about her own poems: it "has the broken, chanced motion of someone thinking out loud."29 Jarrell had taught in the Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization in the summer of 1948, and the poem is set in the Schloss Leopoldskron, where Jarrell lived. The setting provides the only link between the three "games" the poem describes. First, Jarrell plays a game of tennis with a German man. Next, he meets a three-year-old girl who initiates a game well known to German children: she says to Jarrell, "Hier bin i'" [Here I am], and Jarrell, aware of the rules, replies "Da bist du" [There you are]. Throughout these two games, arbitrary and pleasant in themselves, there are hints of some darker significance. The tennis partner had been a prisoner of war in Colorado; and while Jarrell sits on the veranda with the little girl, "a darkness falls, / Rain falls." The poem's third game takes place when the storm has passed. But the sun comes out, and the sky Is for an instant the first rain-washed blue Of becoming: and my look falls Through falling leaves, through the statues' Broken, encircling arms To the lives of the withered grass, To the drops the sun drinks up like dew. In anguish, in expectant acceptance The world whispers: Hier bin i'. "A Game at Salzburg" is a definitively postwar poem: Jarrell remains conscious of the Second World War but explores the odd ways in which the world absorbs its own destructiveness, moving forward. Though he wants to accept the loveliness of the world, there can be no answer to the world's "Here I am": his acceptance is fragile, hesitant, like the associative structure of the poem itself. A month after he published The Seven-League Crutches, Jarrell wondered about the "monotonous violence and extremity" of "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," likening it to "a piece of music that consisted of nothing but climaxes."30 In contrast, Jarrell's "Night before the Night before Christmas," the longest poem in The Seven-League Crutches, seems like a piece of music with no climaxes at all: it embodies a pro-

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cess of almost constant variation or metamorphosis. Like "A Game at Salzburg," though on a much larger scale, "The Night before the Night before Christmas" traces the thoughts of a "wandering mind." But its prosody is looser. And the poem is even more characteristically Jarrell's in that its protagonist is a fourteen-year-old girl. She is (like Jarrell himself) a child of the thirties, and her mind is full of Marx and Engels, John Strachey's The Coming Struggle for Power, and Bertolt Brecht's "In Praise of Learning." Throughout the night, the girl's mind wanders between the "real" world these books describe and a dreamworld populated by her mother and pet squirrel, both of whom have recently died.31 Even as she wraps Christmas presents, the girl cannot accept religious consolation ("how could this world be / If he's all-powerful, allgood?"), but she does believe that Marxist education might save her family. In her dreams, Engels becomes an angel; her squirrel might not have died, she muses, half asleep, "if he were educated." Ultimately, however, her dreams won't protect her from her own life, from "the abyss that is her home." In her final dream, she imagines that she and her brother (who is sick and may be dying as well) are Hansel and Gretel and then John and Wendy from Peter Pan. Staring, staring At the gray squirrel dead in the snow, She and her brother float up from the snow— The last crumbs of their tears Are caught by the birds that are falling To strew their leaves on the snow That is covering, that has covered The play-mound under the snow . . . . The leaves are the snow, the birds are the snow, The boy and girl in the leaves of their grave Are the wings of the bird of the snow. But her wings are mixed in her head with the Way That streams from their shoulders, stars like snow: They spread, at last, their great starry wings And her brother sings, "I am dying."

"No: it's not so, not so— Not really," She thinks; but she says, "You are dying." He says, "I didn't know." And she cries: "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know!" They are flying.

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These lines offer a condensed version of the poem's almost constant process of metamorphosis; their force is centripetal, pushing the poem in several directions at once. Instead of saying "I am flying" as the children do in Peter Pan, the girl's brother says "I am dying." Her dreams had been her only refuge from her mother's death, but death has intruded even there. She makes room for it, however, imagining death as one of childhood's delightful adventures: the word "flying" initially allowed the word "dying" into the dream, but now the acts of flying and dying merge in a fantasy of omnipotence. Yet the dream ends, as it must, and the poem itself ends with these lines. She feels, in her hand, her brother's hand. She is crying. Given his friends' earlier responses to his poems, Jarrell must have known he was courting all the usual objections to his "semifeminine" sensibility. Bishop's example had helped him to write "The Night before the Night before Christmas," but Bishop herself was uncomfortable with the poem. She told Jarrell that she liked it, but she also wondered if it were loose, overly long, and possibly self-indulgent. Jarrell replied cheerfully that "Rilke certainly is monstrously self-indulgent a lot of the time."32 Years earlier, he had told Tate that limpness was an "occupational risk," and Jarrell responded similarly to Bishop's charge of selfindulgence. "The Night before the Night before Christmas" represents his most ambitious effort to write against the grain of certain prejudices his teachers distilled from their strategically limited reading of modernism. And if the poem resists any effort to read it closely; if it violates Poundian strictures against Victorian sentiment; if it fits comfortably neither with the poems of Williams nor the poems of Tate; if it even seems mannered or self-indulgent in its preoccupation with children and fairy tales, then the poem has succeeded in the terms Jarrell valued most. Lowell seemed to recognize this when he wrote that "The Night before the Night before Christmas" was the "best, most mannered, the most unforgettable, and the most irritating poem" in The Seven-League Crutches.33 Like Lowell, Bishop did admire Jarrell's poems, whatever her misgivings; she seemed genuinely dismayed when her second book won the Pulitzer instead of Jarrell's Selected Poems, and she praised Jarrell for avoiding (as she did herself) the "anguish-school that Cal [Lowell] seems innocently to have inspired."34 But given Jarrell's consistent admiration for Bishop, it isn't simply ironic that Bishop was particularly troubled by The Seven-League Crutches. Writing about "A Girl in a Library," another poem from this volume, Langdon Hammer wonders if Jarrell's decision to address the girl "begins to look like a way of

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preserving male authority by making it appear benevolent."35 This charge might be brought against others of Jarrell's poems: their desire to speak to, for, and about women could be a way of appropriating (and thereby delimiting) the terms of femininity. After Jarrell's death, Mary Jarrell recalled that "The Lost Children" (spoken by a woman) grew from her account of one of her own dreams; the most famous lines in the poem ("I know those children. I know all about them. / Where are they?") were actually written by Jarrell's wife. What may initially seem like an act of appropriation and mastery on Jarrell's part is something more complicated, however, since Mary Jarrell recognized that her words echo lines that Jarrell himself had already written in "Thinking of the Lost World." To her, "The Lost Children" was as much about Jarrell's "happy-sad recollections of lost boyhood" as it was about "a woman's happy-sad remembrances of lost motherhood." Similarly, she felt that "The Night before the Night before Christmas" was the first of Jarrell's "lengthy semiautobiographical poems that culminated in the three-part Lost World."36 There are some poems (Hammer is right to single out "A Girl in a Library") in which Jarrell asserts male authority in the guise of sympathy for women; but other poems (like "The Night before the Night") suggest that Jarrell sometimes occupied within our culture a legitimately and productively feminized position. The importance of granting this possibility is suggested by the New York Times review of The Lost World. Dismissing most of the volume, Joseph Bennett wrote that there were four successful poems. Two of them ("Woman" and "In Nature There Is Neither Right nor Left nor Wrong") are unique in The Lost World for their sexism: "Men are what they do, women are what they are," says the tough-talking female narrator of "In Nature." In contrast to these poems, "The Lost World" and "Thinking of the Lost World" are not spoken by women; nor do they concern women's experiences. Having spent many years impersonating a woman's voice, Jarrell seems to drop the mask, speaking openly of his love of childhood, fairy tales, and pets. Tellingly, Bennett found these poems to be infected by "an indulgent and sentimental Mamaism."37 Jarrell had done something worse than pretend to be a woman: he had pretended to be himself. Thematically, structurally, and prosodically, "The Lost World" and its pendant "Thinking of the Lost World" seem in retrospect to be the work Jarrell was always pushing toward. "Thinking of the Lost World" strikes a note that is not uncommon in Jarrell's poetry; in "The End of the Rainbow" or in "The Lost Children" there is a similar sense of emptiness transfigured into something palpable and dear. What is different about "Thinking of the Lost World" is that Jarrell openly associates these feelings not with women but with his own idiosyncratic

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sensibility. Judith Butler has argued that the act of female impersonation, even when it draws on highly conventional styles of femininity, "implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency."38 "Thinking of the Lost World" may in this sense be the logical conclusion of Jarrell's lifelong act of impersonation, since its effort of self-definition is no less dependent on masquerade—on the necessity of dramatizing an identity, rather than taking it for granted. At the end of "Thinking of the Lost World," the bearded Jarrell drives past a boy who calls out "Hi, Santa Claus." Jarrell waves, willing to play along, but startled by the awareness that he's now as old as his grandparents once were. He looks at his hand on the steering wheel, and the hand becomes his grandmother's, brown and spotted: "Where's my own hand?" To answer this question, Jarrell confronts a vision of himself as a child. He knows that the child has nothing to give him. But as in Stevens's "Snow Man" (and looking back to King Lear), "nothing" becomes a powerful presence. As Jarrell drives inexorably forward, into the future, nostalgia is revealed as a fool's game—a game of pretense and disguise that Jarrell plays lovingly, over and over again. I seem to see A shape in tennis shoes and khaki riding-pants Standing there empty-handed; I reach out to it Empty-handed, my hand comes back empty, And yet my emptiness is traded for its emptiness, I have found that Lost World in the Lost and Found Columns whose gray illegible advertisements My soul has memorized world after world: LOST—NOTHING. STRAYED FROM NOWHERE. NO REWARD.

I hold in my own hands, in happiness, Nothing: the nothing for which there's no reward.

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Poem after poem is gracefully and competently done, there is good taste and intelligence throughout, there is variety of theme and an interesting, largely mythological, field of allusion. . . . But on the whole the poet's many evident talents only add to one's sense of frustration at the tameness and not-quiteness of his poetry; if this be the new decorum, I suggest we scoot back to modernism.1

B

ack to modernism: in the aftermath of the turmoil Pound and Eliot injected into the American literary scene, Richard Wilbur's poetry has sometimes seemed a little too calm, and this statement is similar to many responses his poetry received throughout the 1940s and 50s. Randall Jarrell was sympathetic but skeptical: he wrote to Elizabeth Bishop, "who'd have thought that the era of the poet in the Grey Flannel Suit was coming?"2 But poets like Robert Bly weren't sympathetic at all. Writing in kayak, Bly quoted Wilbur's "Mind," and said, "as a fist, kayak is raised against stuff like this, crystallized flower formations from the jolly intellectual dandies."3 The battle lines of American poetry after modernism seem clear 65

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enough here (the bardic Bly and the fastidious Wilbur) and other poets have been quick to jump to Wilbur's defense. Anthony Hecht once praised Wilbur for standing apart from "this poetic era of arrogant solipsism and limp narcissism—when great, shaggy herds of poets write only about themselves."4 That's one way to respond to Bly's fist: with another fist. Wilbur's response, "A Postcard for Bob Bly," took a different form: "Granted that it's a figurative fist," Wilbur admitted, "That critics punch as harmlessly as kittens"; nevertheless, "when you incite to riot / Against your friend, he is not pleasured by it."5 Refusing to raise a fist, Wilbur reminds Ely that he retains a stockpile of ammunition. Bly and Wilbur were both at Harvard in the late 1940s, and Wilbur surely remembered (even if Bly didn't) the shaggy bard's earlier incarnation as New Critical aesthete. As the editor of the Harvard Advocate, Bly gave this slap on the wrist to Kenneth Rexroth. Perhaps it is unfortunate that Rexroth should have been let loose on the Romantics; there is, I think, a difference between the desire to express personal emotion by increased direct reference to the world of nature, and the desire to overthrow all external discipline of morals of government.6 The symmetries are perfect here. The early Bly offers an opinion of which the later Hecht might have approved. Wilbur stands in the middle of the fray, seemingly aware that an unnuanced extreme can too easily fold into its opposite. Which is not to say that Wilbur is a poet without opinions. The quotation with which I began is in fact not a criticism of Wilbur (though it sounds like one) but Wilbur's own criticism of John Heath-Stubbs, offered in 1950. Even at this early point in his career, Wilbur had little patience for the values that are usually ascribed to him (mere grace, taste, craft, or elegance), and though it's tempting to say that Wilbur is criticizing himself in the mirror of Heath-Stubbs, I think it's safer to say that Wilbur is that rare thing: a seriously misunderstood poet. Because the style of his poetry is so distinctive, so easily opposed to the later Bly, readers assume that Wilbur is deeply invested in distinctions. The poetry itself shows otherwise. Wilbur has gleefully gone "back to modernism" to learn from Moore, Stevens, Eliot, Frost, and Williams; at the same time, he has moved past it precisely because of his openness to modernism's variety of poetic practices. Wilbur's respect for Williams offers one potent example of this openness. In the same review in which he found Heath-Stubbs's poetry tepid, Wilbur called the form of Williams's poetry "perfect" (though he confessed that he couldn't say exactly why it was so). A few years earlier, Wilbur wrote a response to talks given by Williams and Louise Bogan

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at the now legendary Bard College poetry conference, organized by Theodore Weiss. Wilbur disagreed with Williams, who argued for the historical necessity of free verse, and agreed with Bogan, who maintained—brilliantly—that the last hundred years had witnessed not a steady opening up of poetic form but an "alternate and gradual loosening and tightening of form."7 But Wilbur was adamant that "in criticizing Dr. Williams' criticism" he was "not out to attack free verse." Especially not Williams's free verse. Wilbur's prime contention was that "poets can't afford to forget that there is a reality of things which survives all orders great and small," and his examples of this "heartfelt subservience to the external" included Williams's "ashcans, wastepaper and red wheelbarrows," along with Marianne Moore's poems, Cezanne's paintings, and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.8 Wilbur's own work, culminating in the poems of Things of This World, also displays a radical loyalty to the physical world, even though the poems don't sound at all like Williams. In an essay on Wilbur's poetry of "being," Nathan Scott rehearses the great divide between New Critical and Black Mountain poets, suggesting that "in the case of Wilbur at least, we may notice in one important particular this divide being surmounted, in the degree to which he appears to be seeking a kind of metaphysical ground not unlike that at which, say, a poet like Robert Duncan aims."9 But even if the metaphysics are similar, the verse sounds different. Like Elizabeth Bishop, from whom he first learned "the joy of putting a poem together,"10 Wilbur never felt the need to overthrow or break through traditional poetic forms in order to bring his poetry closer to the physical world. No matter how fully engaged with the realities, natural and political, of his time, consequently, Wilbur's style made him seem "irresponsible." That is Wilbur's own word, but one could add (given the ways in which formal extravagance has been associated arbitrarily with certain values) elitist, insincere, and reactionary. Wilbur is none of these things. The external world that elicits his loyalty includes laundry dazzled by sunlight; but it also includes the Vietnam War. And though the laundry may seem more prominent, the political upheavals of the last fifty years have been the ballast of Wilbur's poetry. Writing "Little Gidding," T. S. Eliot worried that the poem required "some acute personal reminiscence (never to be explicated, of course, but to give power from well below the surface)."11 In Wilbur's poetry, the material that lies below the surface of the poem, giving it power, tends to be public and historical rather than private and personal. On the surface, Wilbur may not often seem like a political poet, but his inspiration has come consistently from the public events of his time.

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Unlike Elizabeth Bishop, Wilbur has written more than a few explicitly political poems ("Mined Country," "Speech for the Repeal of the McCarran Act," "A Miltonic Sonnet for Mr. Johnson," or "A Fable," to name only a few). Wilbur tends to engage the mainstream of American liberal politics in a way that Bishop (whose poems follow an equally powerful path) does not. Like Bishop, however, Wilbur is uncomfortable with what he has called the "speechifying" of much political poetry, preferring to recognize the ways in which "any full poetry is bound to have an implicit political dimension."12 Wilbur's poems have many other important qualities, but their "political dimension" interests me especially, given the ways in which the poems have been misread as mere formal confections, pretty but irresponsible. In fact, Wilbur's poems take their extravagant shapes precisely because of his respect for the magnitude of the world, both lovely and horrific, outside the poet's mind. 1 he McCarran Internal Security Act, enacted by Congress in 1950, required members of the Communist party to register with the attorney general; other organizations had to supply lists of their members. Wilbur's "Speech for the Repeal of the McCarran Act" was published only a few months later, and it grew from a long-standing opposition to government censorship and coercion. In 1938 the House of Representatives formed its special committee to investigate un-American activities. Wilbur's comment on its chairman, Martin Dies, appeared in the Amherst Touchstone. He'd banish all the aliens If you gave him half a chance. The ample seat of Mr. Dies' Extremely ample pants Is filled with all the bitingest Of patriotic ants.13 These lines are taken from one of the first poems Wilbur published, a clever undergraduate poem that is also politically astute. When one of Wilbur's classmates wrote to the Amherst Student, objecting to Wilbur's views in patriotic terms, Wilbur's response was abrupt: "the primary threat to our democracy, as has been said often but not often enough, is that Red-baiters, Jew-baiters and professional patriots will impair our civil liberties in their haste to suppress those whom they believe threaten those liberties."14 Wilbur became the editor of the Student and again and again wrote editorials defending the preservation of civil liberties. Characteristically undogmatic, Wilbur once remarked that "the question is not one con-

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earning the merits of Communism"; his satire on Martin Dies was published beside another on "Labor's William Green."15 But Wilbur also published his own interview (signed "Lenin") with Earl Browder, secretary of the American Communist Party, and it was with Browder that Wilbur's sympathies lay. Many years later, Wilbur would remember his own brush with intolerance after he was drafted in 1942. Reporting for duty at Fort Dix, I was assigned to cryptographic training, and thereafter sent on to a secret cryptanalytic camp in the woods of Virginia, where (as I later discovered) my progress into cryptanalysis was cut short by adverse security reports from the CIC and FBI. It was quite true that I held leftist views and had radical friends, and that I had been so stupid as to keep a volume of Marx in my footlocker; but then as now I had an uncomplicated love of my country, and I was naively amazed to learn that my service record was stamped "Suspected of Disloyalty."16 Perhaps it was this experience that made Wilbur hold onto his reverence for civil liberties in the fifties, when many members of his generation succumbed to a more urgent postwar sense of alarm over national security. Wilbur had opposed the war, often writing in the Student about the dangers of dogmatic, unspecific patriotism. His position was not popular. "You're all afraid for your skins," shouted one professor to a group of anti-interventionist students; another told Wilbur that "if we refuse to fight, we refuse to do our duty; there is, after all, a Christian way of fighting, a way of fighting with as much decency and good sportsmanship as possible." But Wilbur took far more heat when he suggested that it was wrong even to expect the certainty of conviction from people of his generation: "What is taken for idealism in Youth is inexperience and verbosity, and our enthusiasm is the product of good health and bad judgment." When the editor of the Williams Record wrote to protest this editorial, Wilbur responded by holding up the value of hesitancy and doubt in a time of easily adopted convictions: "An education ought to disillusion, then reconstruct. Its disease and its glory is indecision. A man who is barely beginning his education, should be thoroughly maladjusted in the world of ideas. If hesitation and suspense of judgment strike him as 'cowardly,' it is evident that he is more interested in conditioning than free education."17 There's a touch of grandstanding here (the young Wilbur is enjoying his notoriety) but the position was neither jejune nor unique; more experienced journalists (like Kenneth Burke) were paying for it as Wilbur wrote. And while the older Wilbur has understandably downplayed the

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interest of these early writings, his early impatience with dogmatism became the seedbed for his later nonoppositional thinking—the kind of thinking that allows him to learn from Williams even as he disagrees with him. Objecting to Wilbur's response to Williams and Bogan, James Breslin says that "Wilbur is so sensible, so balanced, has such 'complexity of attitude' on the question of form that he is left with no ground to stand on."18 But the early political writings, in which Wilbur learned how to maintain such an attitude, show that doubt and hesitation offered him a solid foundation. "The poetic position is seldom on the fence," lamented Wilbur in one of his few college editorials about poetry rather than politics: "Any grail will do . . . . The war is a natural, and the most stimulating side of the fence is the crusader's, of course." Just as Wilbur wondered about the ability of youth to cope with complicated political questions, he worried about the capacity of poetry too: "what are the natural limitations of emotional poetry?" But when the United States entered the war, Wilbur recognized sensibly that while his poems could continue to sit on the fence, he could not: "now that we are fighting, what is needed is unanimity and determined action." Even this level of conviction was not firm enough for Wilbur's critics, however; he quoted these sentences from the Pearl Harbor editorial of the Williams Record in order to justify his own eschewal of passionate conviction: "We fight Nazis and Nipponese together, to crush a revolutionary nihilism that has sought to corrupt the world. We fight them with our steel and our blood and our lives, until we build the union of free peoples everywhere that alone can guarantee the life we cherish."19 Without ever adopting this sort of rhetoric, Wilbur served with the 36th Infantry Division in Italy and Southern France and along the Siegfried Line in Germany. (The army overlooked his disloyalty, installing Wilbur as the division's cryptographer, when his predecessor suffered a mental breakdown.) Wilbur had considered a career in journalism, but it was during the war (as he subsequently explained in "On My Own Work") that Wilbur wrote his first serious poems: "My first poems were written in answer to the inner and outer disorders of the Second World War and they helped me, as poems should, to take ahold of raw events and convert them, provisionally, into experience."20 His first professionally published poem, "Italy: Maine" (signed by Pvt. Richard P. Wilbur), remains uncollected but, from today's perspective, the poem seems closer to Wilbur's mature voice than several of the poems that made it into The Beautiful Changes, his first book. Whose song is for swarm and surfeit, let him win This passive land, moist-green and sun-stunned.

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I'll go after Spike grass, crab apple, gargoyle tamarack And the last crazy jack pine climbing Cadillac's back.21 These final lines of "Italy: Maine" sound a note that will be richly harmonized throughout Wilbur's later poems: a devotion to the unmasterable and apparently insignificant details of the natural world, lovingly catalogued. But the lines are especially useful because they help to show how this aspect of Wilbur's sensibility was formed. In one of his Amherst columns Wilbur offered a list of trivial events (a hen laying a triple-yolk egg; the Song Writers' Protective Association voting 372 to 24 to censure "She Had to Go and Lose It at the Astor"; a member of the House of Representatives objecting so loudly to the Wages and Hours bill that his opponent's hearing was restored) that transpired along with the first battles of the World War: "A daily reading of these items in this war year should be a tonic to us all, a reassurance that everything is not dramatic, world-shaking and momentous, for these little stories are about the people whose lives are the true history of this year 1940 and of all years."22 Visible here, as in "Italy: Maine," is the Wilbur who would more than a decade later complain that "there is at present no want of apocalyptic emotionalism or of connoisseurial detachment among us, but the poem of modest and genuine feeling does not seem to come readily."23 Wilbur was trying to write those poems himself, and he would eventually offer a kind of credo for them in "A Wood," published in Walking to Sleep: "Some would distinguish nothing here but oaks, / Proud heads conversant with the power and glory," the poem begins. Wilbur wants to notice the dogwood—"overshadowed, small / But not inclined to droop." And given that the sun is, practically speaking, equally distant from dogwood and oak, he concludes that "no one style, I think, is recommended." Wilbur has always understood that his own style may cause him to be underestimated, no matter how timely his utterance. As James Dickey put it early on, "Wilbur's is not essentially a tragic mind, and the lack of this one quality will probably keep him, in the estimates of literary historians and other fossils, from being called a 'major poet': one having made large Miltonic or Poundian flights."24 Once again the wartime context reveals the real power of Wilbur's position. After "Italy: Maine," Wilbur's next publication was a group of poems that appeared in Foreground, along with a harrowing prose account of wartime deprivation and displacement. "The Day After the War" culminates in this passage: When all you can remember is the getting up in the morning, the lineup, the bored cruelties of the guards, the tasteless soup

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MODERN POETRY AFTER MODERNISM and sawdust bread, the goaded dragging hurrying line to the field, the road, the tunnel, the mine, the lathe, the sawmill, the powder-plant; and the grey shadows on the ceiling all night when it was too cold to sleep When you have lost all identity, all relation, all significance of speech, all notion of belonging anywhere in the world, when you have experienced nothing as a real entity, touching, filling, numbing and abolishing you Then the passing of a truck will fill your whole head with the clatter of bouncing planking, and the sight of leaves silvered on the undersides by road-dust will please you to smiling, and the sight of a child suckling will make you want to fall to your knees, and the explosion of a thrush will make you laugh in your throat, and the rain falling on you and coursing down your face and plastering your shirt to your skin, running down your stomach and your legs and filling your shoes will make you grin like a fool.25

As a student, Wilbur understood the value of little things; as a new private, just shipped off to Italy, he yearned for the particularity of Maine's landscape. Wilbur's experience as a soldier taught him intimately that the details of the most insignificant thing may, in a particular place and time, hold more power than the grandest Miltonic or Poundian flight. Most of the poems published with "The Day After the War" were war poems ("Place Pigalle," "Potato," "Mined Country"), and among them, "Potato" values what is "too common to cherish or steal." But it is in "Cigales," published a few months later, that the power of particular things is explored most deeply. This poem, eventually chosen as the opening poem in The Beautiful Changes (and later retitled "Cicadas"), contains lines that the deep-imagist Bly might have written—"Even the leaves / have thick tongues"—but builds on Marianne Moore's probing of the animal world's moral value. Wilbur's focus is the cicada, and the way it resists any human effort to locate significance in its song: "Such a plain thing / morals could not surround." This thin uncomprehended song it is springs healing questions into binding air. Fabre, by firing all the municipal cannon under a piping tree, found out cicadas cannot hear. Wilbur had wondered, given most poetry's inability to sit on the fence, if it were possible to write an isolationist poem. "Cigales" is such a poem, for despite Wilbur's rejection of any human meaning for this insect, its song functions as an emblem for poetry—especially poetry

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written in a time of war. Wilbur suggests that the poet sings as the cicada sings, deaf to the cannon's roar. And yet, like the self-made song of Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West," the cicada's song nevertheless becomes involved with the world it cannot sense. "Cigales" rejects the terms of most war poetry (terms implying, as Wilbur would later put it, that a poem is " 'serious' and 'significant' because it mentions the atomic bomb"26) and turns from the momentous to the commonplace and the particular. Yet Wilbur's position in The Beautiful Changes is not consistent enough to be dogmatic: while other poems in the volume (notably "Objects" and "A Dutch Courtyard") extend his praise for minutiae, the poems immediately following "Cigales" include much grander images of war ("On the Eyes of an SS Officer"), suggesting that it is difficult—an achievement rather than a retreat—to keep the poem focused on little things. Given the importance of Moore's example for Wilbur, it is interesting to note that his way of responding to the Second World War was closer to Moore's than Elizabeth Bishop's was. When Moore read Bishop's "Roosters" she was shocked by what seemed to her the violence of its rhymes and the coarseness of its images, going so far as to rewrite the poem. She might have approved of "Cigales," however, for, like Wilbur's, Moore's preoccupation with the commonplace was in part a response to the pressure of wartime vulgarity. Moore's "Reinforcements," first published during the First World War and later collected in her 1921 Poems, begins with these stanzas. The vestibule to experience is not to be exalted into epic grandeur. These men are going to their work with this idea, advancing like a school of fish through still water—waiting to change the course or dismiss the idea of movement, till forced to. The words of the Greeks ring in our ears, but they are vain in comparison with a sight like this. Moore wants her title to invoke the idea of military reinforcements, but the poem also addresses the ways in which the language of poetry— the usual terms of war poetry—might become a "reinforcement" of war. Faced with the vastness of war, the words of the Greeks ring in her ears, but she is unwilling to exalt the experience with epic grandeur. Moore's later response to the war was to write self-consciously "little" poems rather than ambitious (and, for Moore, masculine) poems that answer an epic challenge. Analyzing Moore's response to Bishop's "Roosters," Betsy Erkkila shows that Moore's "moral, decorous, and ladylike aesthetic posture" was, at least in the early years of Moore's career, a finely honed weapon.27 But by the time Bishop wrote "Roost-

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ers," Bishop was not interested in appearing ladylike, no matter what benefits might be derived from it. By extending Moore's aesthetic, in contrast, Wilbur became a poet who was (like Jarrell) sometimes perceived as "ladylike," especially in a poetic climate that valued the transgression of all decorums. Wilbur was undaunted by this perception; the poems of his second volume extend Moore's method even as they cease to respond to warfare. Ceremony is clearly a postwar book, and its poems engage a different world. In "Driftwood" Wilbur meditates on the particular qualities of a length of wood, considering how it once knew a "rapt, gradual growing" before it was "milled into / Oar and plank" and then released into "the great generality of waters." Human significance begins to accumulate: the living tree knew its "own nature only," and even after it was subjected to the generalizing ocean, it did not "dissolve" but rather became "involved" with "the gnarled swerve and tangle of tides." At the end of the poem Wilbur (mindful of the lesson of "Cigales") addresses his own effort to understand driftwood as an emblem of integrity. In a time of continual dry abdications And of damp complicities, They are fit to be taken for signs, these emblems. Although Wilbur might seem to offer driftwood as a timeless sign, these lines insist that driftwood is fit to be taken for a sign in a particular time—"a time of continual dry abdications / And of damp complicities." Wilbur is describing the initial years of the Cold War, as his note on "Driftwood" makes even clearer: "the poem began when a friend tried to argue me into a revolutionary political party on the grounds that there are at present two choices only, Communism or Fascism." Like Wallace Stevens, Wilbur distrusted political affiliations so singleminded that they were easily adopted and just as easily dropped. His early drafts for the poem show that he began by describing generally this time of damp complicities before he focused on the emblematic qualities of driftwood: "On a day of an age when allegiance is always too heavy or light / I singular walk to myself on the glass banks of the sea."28 As Wilbur recognized, he was assigning meaning to this landscape (and thinking perhaps too consciously of Whitman and Stevens), rather than deducing meaning, and he turned his eye to the particular qualities of driftwood as a better way of earning his convictions. Wilbur may have been worried that in the process the political content of "Driftwood" was obscured: he first published the completed poem beside "We," which clearly locates the time of dry affiliations in the postwar years. Once an ally, Russia quickly replaced Germany as

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the enemy against which a fragile sense of American identity could be shaped. How good to have the Russians to abhor: It lets us dance the nation on our knee Who haven't been quite certain since the war Precisely what we meant by saying we.29 Wilbur never collected this poem. While it has some of the attractive verve of the political verse he wrote in college, it doesn't stand up against a mature poem like "Driftwood." I think Wilbur came to see that his particular strength did not lie in this kind of political poem— or in the kind of political poem that "Driftwood" appeared to be in its initial drafts. Ultimately, the final version of "Driftwood" didn't need "We" to bolster its examination of damp complicities: the struggles of the Cold War lay behind its metaphors in the way that Eliot wanted personal experience to lie beneath "Little Gidding." Published along with "Driftwood" and "We" in 1948 was "To an American Poet Just Dead," a more clearly topical poem that did make it into Ceremony. "It is out in the comfy suburbs I read you are dead," says Wilbur to the American poet Phelps Putnam, who won't be mourned by sprinklers, deep-freeze units, or Studebakers: "The suburbs deepen in their sleep of death." Characteristically, Wilbur won't ignore the contradictions of his position; he admits that he himself lives in the suburbs. But over and over again throughout his poems of the 1950s Wilbur chastises the complacency embodied here in the word "suburbs" or (more surreptitiously) in the word "peace." In "From the Lookout Rock" he surveys a world without any kind of vital contention, concluding that "for this was not the peace we prayed." In "Grasse: The Olive Trees" he surveys a landscape where "luxury's the common lot"; but this condition is not pleasing to Wilbur, and he's relieved to notice that "the olive contradicts." These anxious, famished branches seem like "clouds of doubt against the earth's array," and Wilbur concludes that they teach "the South it is not paradise." Neither of these poems refers openly to political complacencies, but, as in "Driftwood," Wilbur's metaphors stand on his awareness of the history of his time. This distrust of suburbs, luxury, and paradise is especially interesting to me because Wilbur is often thought of as a poet who values these things above anything else: "The Poetry of Suburbia" was the title of Horace Gregory's review of Things of This World. This is one of the ways in which, as I began by saying, Wilbur is deeply misunderstood: the plain content of his poems is often overlooked because of associations readers bring to his formal dexterity. Even more suspicious than the use of meter and rhyme is the fact that Wilbur's style hasn't changed much

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over the years. In "Poetry and Happiness" Wilbur applauded Robert Lowell's transformation in Life Studies, saying that these poems represented a "withering into the truth" (Yeats's phrase) that at some point occurs "in the life of every poet," though not necessarily so dramatically.30 But in the world after Life Studies, free verse seemed essential to such a withering, and Wilbur's formalism seemed like the sign of complacency, luxury, suburbia—everything Wilbur abhors. Wilbur never needed to buck against the traditions of poetic form because he accepted the idea that any human utterance is by nature indirect: wanting to cleave as closely to the external world as possible, he resists any mystical sense of the poet's ability to transcend the boundaries of language or thought. In an uncollected essay on landscape, Wilbur says he was "not out to deny the distance" between himself and the natural world: "fusing [the landscape] with my thoughts and feelings and interpreting it through my human senses, it does not trouble me that my words do not essentialize it."31 Far from troubling him, the artificiality of language seems to Wilbur an unavoidable aspect of experience: in the essay responding to Williams and Bogan, Wilbur is adamant that a "heartfelt subservience to the external" could be sustained only through a recognition (Wilbur compares the poet's formal ingenuity with a rain-dancer's) of "the difficulty—the impossibility—of achieving a direct expressive relationship with the rain, or with any other real thing."32 Like Marianne Moore or the Williams of Spring and All before him, Wilbur feels that only an extravagantly artificial art may, by respecting the alterity of the genuine, approach it. ("What is more precise than precision?" asked Moore: "Illusion.") This healthy skepticism, not the formal artifice of his poetry, is what ultimately separates Wilbur from poets like Duncan, whose allegiance to the physical world he otherwise shares. That allegiance, apparent in earlier poems like "Cigales" and "Driftwood," became the keynote of Wilbur's third book, published in 1956. Things of This World received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and the volume still stands, along with Walking to Sleep, as one of Wilbur's finest achievements. "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" or "A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra" are as full of the joy of language as they are of the joy of the physical world: especially in the latter poem, language becomes a physical presence, the syntax so intricate, yet so plainly apprehensible, that it begs to be turned over in the mouth. The quieter "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" is, famously, a poem of immanence: angels exist because, for a moment, the mind imagines them in laundry hanging on the line. But this argument against a world-denouncing spirituality is only half of the poem's purpose. A more violent, urgent world is registered in Wil-

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bur's diction: words like rape and hunks slip into his elegant vocabulary, and their prominence has sometimes troubled the poem's admirers. Wilbur's point is that a devotion to laundry alone—to the world's sensual pleasures, physical and linguistic—may be as world-denying as the most ascetic spirituality. While the soul cries, "let there be nothing on earth but laundry," the language of the poem has suggested that this desire is unrealistic even before the poem's final lines (spoken by the soul as it descends into the awakening body) make Wilbur's position clear. "Bring them down from their ruddy gallows; Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves; Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone, And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating Of dark habits, keeping their difficult balance." The balance here is not only between the physical and spiritual, but between a state of mind that dallies with physical pleasures and a necessary awakening to a sterner, even more challenging ground. I wouldn't argue that "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" has much of (in Wilbur's phrase) "an implicit political dimension." But I do think that the poem became possible because of Wilbur's earlier meditations on wartime loss and postwar deprivation. Similarly, the final poem in Things of This World, "For the New Railway Station in Rome," grew from Wilbur's impatience with Cold War doom and gloom—an intellectual climate in which one disapproving reviewer of Things asked, "how can he be so damnably good-natured in an abominable world?" Like Jarrell, Wilbur sides with Robert Frost, who responded to postwar apocalypticism by pointing out that every generation stakes its own claim for historical ultimacy: "I say they claimed the honor for their ages. They claimed it rather for themselves. It is immodest of a man to think of himself as going down before the worst forces ever mobilized by God."33 "For the New Railway Station" begins with a litany of the doomsayers' favorite images (Rome, hurt pillars, rubble, dust, the forum) before it upends a cliche: "there's something new / To see in Rome." See, from the travertine Face of the office block, the roof of the booking-hall Sails out into the air beside the ruined Servian Wall, Echoing in its light And cantilevered swoop of reinforced concrete

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At this point the shards begin to speak as eloquently as Keats's urn. But Wilbur's well-wrought stanzas (as masterful as those of "A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra") do not trace the contours of an ancient urn or fountain. Appearing after Wilbur's paean to Roman antiquity in Things of This World, "For the New Railway Station" assures by its very form that Wilbur is no antiquarian; a swoop of cantilevered concrete does as well as a "ragged, loose / Collapse of water." If all that Wilbur offered in "For the New Railway Station in Rome" were something new to offset the decline of civilization, he would tacitly concede the doomsayers' point. (And, as the reviewer suggested, Wilbur would merely be good-natured.) Instead, the poem interrogates the means by which hurt pillars are taken as signs of decline—or concrete swoops as signs of progress. Wilbur's doomsayers "would not take the sun standing at noon / For a good sign." This line cuts two ways, for it suggests both that the doomsayers are insensitive to the daily particularity of their world and that they are incapable of taking anything for a good sign. Neither the Roman forum nor the railway station stands for our future, just as the song of the cicada doesn't naturally stand for anything: the human imagination invests these objects with meaning, producing signs whose arbitrariness the doom-sayers have forgotten. Here, as in so many of his poems, Wilbur champions a deductive looking at particular shapes of things rather than an inductive attribution of qualities. But—again typically—he doesn't believe that things can speak to us outside the parameters of human thought or formal ingenuity. The speaking shards at the end of the poem are the product of a selfconsciously flagrant act of human imagination, and their final words ("What does it say over the door of Heaven / But homo fecit?") could stand over all of Wilbur's paeans to particular things, beginning with "Italy: Maine." "It is easy to prophesy against us," said Wilbur in "Poetry and Happiness";34 the title poem of Advice to a Prophet builds on "For the New Railway Station," suggesting that prophecy will be believable only if it catalogues the simple, apparently insignificant things we could lose: "The dolphin's arc, the dove's return, / These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken." But Advice to a Prophet as a whole seems a little disappointing after Things of This World, in which one glorious poem seems to topple over the next. The disappointment is perhaps inevitable, given the midcareer achievement of Things, but Wilbur himself has said that there are poems in Advice to a Prophet that he wishes he had never published. Any great writer's career has its lulls, but I

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think this moment in Wilbur's career is especially revealing of his strengths. A comment Wilbur once made about Day Lewis's later work may also describe the predicament of his own career: "He is left with his earnestness, his good-will, a poetic manner appropriate to a matter [the political turmoil of the 1930s] which has deserted him."35 The poems of The Beautiful Changes and Ceremony grew quite directly from Wilbur's engagement with wartime struggles, physical and ideological. In the poems of Things of This World those struggles are more distant, but they lurk beneath the surfaces of the poems (to continue with Eliot's metaphor) in identifiable ways. By the time Wilbur wrote Advice to a Prophet that historical ballast was lost: a few poems retain a sense of urgency, but too many others finally seem like the extenuation of a manner after the matter that provoked it has dropped away. Together with 'Walking to Sleep, published in 1969, Advice to a Prophet nevertheless confirms my sense that Wilbur's best writing comes in response to the events of his time: while the connection is too often missing in Advice to a Prophet, it is prominent throughout the poems of Walking to Sleep. Wilbur seems to have been reinvigorated by the 1960s in general and by his opposition to the Vietnam War in particular. His manner faced a newly urgent matter, and the result was, with "In the Field" (the first section of Walking to Sleep), the finest group of poems that Wilbur has written. Several pages away from this group stands "A Miltonic Sonnet for Mr. Johnson on His Refusal of Peter Hurd's Official Portrait." The octet's long subordinate clause compares Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War with Jefferson's legacy of Enlightenment ideals; the sestet addresses Johnson directly: Rightly you say the picture is too large Which Peter Hurd by your appointment drew, And justly call this Capitol too bright Which signifies our people in your charge. These lines are Miltonic in several ways, not least in the stern intrusion of a trochee ("Rightly") at the sonnet's volta. But they are Wilburian too. After turning Johnson's criticism of the official portrait against him, Wilbur doesn't leave himself, one of the people, untainted by criticism. This turn was important to Wilbur for reasons he explained in an interview conducted a few months after the sonnet was written: "I recall that Allen Ginsberg recently asked an audience whether they would consent to the proposition that the United States government, in its foreign policy, is psychotic. Something like a third of the audience voted for that idea. They and Mr. Ginsberg are setting themselves up as supersane. . . . Though I can share all their objections to our Viet Nam policy,

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I'm all for institutions."35 That last comment—as Wilbur well knew— could make him no friends in 1968. (And there might be a touch of grandstanding here too: in middle age as in his youth Wilbur sometimes enjoys the notoriety of standing apart.) But Wilbur's sonnet embodies the sentiment with greater power—both thematically, in its meditation on the office of the president, and formally, in its rejuvenation of Milton's trumpet for political poetry. "A Miltonic Sonnet" is the only conventionally political poem in the volume, but even if Wilbur had not included it, Walking to Sleep would still seem like a book provoked by wartime visions of carnage and wartime lapses of conscience. The book (and the group of poems called "In the Field") opens with "The Lilacs," which offers a simple story of the lilac's growth, cast in the Anglo-Saxon alliterative line. Recalling "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," Wilbur's metaphors tell a somewhat more complicated story: the stalks begin "Like walking wounded from the dead of winter"; their "bullet-shaped buds" grow out of "present pain and from past terror"; the blooms are "Healed in that hush, that hospital quiet." But the lilacs themselves ultimately reveal nothing of "their mortal message"—unless we can measure the depth of hell by "the pure power / of this perfume." This concluding line of the parable offers Wilbur's characteristic moral about the hidden potency of earthly things. And the poem following "The Lilacs" gives historical weight to the parable's metaphors, forcing us to return to these lines with a more vivid sense of what the "present pain" may be: "some dirty war" preoccupies Wilbur in "On the Marginal Way," transforming even casual fancies into images of violence. Several of the poems of "In the Field" are themselves about this dialectic between metaphor and historical reality (or what Wilbur several times calls "fact"). But throughout "In a Churchyard" and "In the Field" itself (the poem that gives this section of Walking to Sleep its title), even the slightest reference to the "dirty war" drops away, leaving only the struggle of the dialectic. These poems seem to me even stronger than "A Miltonic Sonnet" or "On the Marginal Way": Wilbur works best when he feels the challenge of history but records the more surreptitious ways in which the challenge enters our lives and poems. "In the Field" begins with a recollection of a nighttime walk. Wilbur and his wife gaze at a sky that seems almost domestic in its familiarity: the field-grass through which they wade is like "the cloudy dregs" of a teacup, and Andromeda, transformed into a constellation, is selfsufficient, requiring neither Perseus to protect her nor Euripides to tell her tale. "But none of that was true": Wilbur is caught short, reminded that he's speaking of metaphors, of stories spun on filaments of light,

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and the sky suddenly seems emptied of human relevance. Initially he doesn't let this emptiness include him: The heavens jumped away, Bursting the cincture of the zodiac, Shot flares with nothing left to say To us, not coming back Unless they should at last Like hard-flung dice that ramble out the throw, Be gathered for another cast. Whether that might be so We could not say, but trued Our talk awhile to words of the real sky, Chatting of class or magnitude, Star-clusters, nebulae. Wilbur is an experienced fiction-maker, knowing that to have abandoned one metaphor is only to have tried on another; dice replace the shapes that Greece or Babylon discerned. But he slips—perhaps knowingly, at first—when he imagines that he "trues" his thought with words of the real sky. This is the movement toward "fact" that "In the Field" shares with "On the Marginal Way" and "In a Churchyard," and throughout these poems the facts are anything but stable. In "On the Marginal Way" Wilbur fights off a vision of the Holocaust with geological facts; but the violence of volcanic eruption and glacial movement offers no haven from imaginative vision. It is not simply the imagination's waywardness that leads him to find new horror in "the facts"; it is "the time's fright," his knowledge of "some dirty war." Wilbur is less specific about the "nip of fear" that approaches him in "In the Field," but its effect is the same: metaphor takes the upper hand, and Wilbur is left with nothing—"All worlds dashed out without a trace, / The very light unmade." This dialectic between imagination and fact is a messy one, for "fact" is conceived of unusually as something comforting rather than something to escape; later, as imagination works on fact, the distinction between the two collapses, and there is nowhere to seek refuge but in the dialectic itself—the process of time and the mind's ability to conceive of it. Similarly, when fact interrupts the reverie of "In a Churchyard" (a pendant to Gray's "Elegy") in the form of a ringing bell, the real sound is "far more strange" than the imagined, the "things that are" more mysterious than any vision. This is because the world of "things

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that are" includes mortality—"the darker dead"—the undeniable fact as well as the ultimate mystery. The project of "In the Field" is to remain aware of this final reality but not be overwhelmed by it. In the second half of the poem Wilbur returns to the field during the day, his metaphor-making skills rejuvenated. Stars, invisible in daylight, are now "holes in heaven [that] have been sealed / Like rain-drills in a pond." The only starry sky now visible is on earth: "galaxies / Of flowers, dense and manifold." At night, Wilbur only felt these flowers (he had mistaken them for field-grass the night before) brushing against his legs. As in so many poems, he is saved by a close look at the physical world: daisies, heal-all, and hawkweed, all of them committing "to air / The seeds of their return." Behind that heal-all lurks the flower of Robert Frost's "Design," and Wilbur follows Frost in suggesting that no "design of darkness," independent of the mind's ability to imagine it, may "govern in a thing so small." We could no doubt mistake These flowers for some answer to that fright We felt for all creation's sake In our dark talk last night, Taking to heart what came Of the heart's wish for life, which, staking here In the least field an endless claim, Beats on from sphere to sphere And pounds beyond the sun, Where nothing less peremptory can go, And is ourselves, and is the one Unbounded thing we know. Just as Frost knows that birches aren't broken by boys, Wilbur knows that the field, imagined as an earthly heaven, is not really an answer to his fright. More importantly, just as Frost knows that a spider is not brought to a heal-all by some force of evil, Wilbur now knows better that no design of darkness determines his place—or some dirty war's place—in the universe. Wilbur achieves no higher eloquence than the final lines of "In the Field": the poem is worthy to stand with "Directive," "The Idea of Order at Key West," or "At the Fishhouses." This is company Wilbur wanted to keep from the beginning of his career. Discussing his first book, I concentrated on Moore's presence in the poems, but traces of Frost, Stevens, Eliot, and Williams are also apparent, sometimes overwhelmingly so. And while it is a commonplace to notice Wilbur's early ventriloquism (he was sometimes chas-

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tised for it), I mention it again to suggest that the magnanimity of "In the Field" is the ultimate fruit of Wilbur's openness to his immediate predecessors. Reviewing Robert Graves in 1955, Wilbur quoted this statement about modernism: "the mainly negative work begun by the 'modernists' of the Twenties in exploring the limits of technical experiment is finished and done with." With Laura Riding, Graves had first voiced this opinion as early as 1928, in A Survey of Modernist Poetry. But Wilbur added a sentence to Graves's: "and indeed there are styles of the Thirties and Forties, not technically extreme, which would seem to have had their time of prevalence."37 Unlike Graves, Wilbur is not battling modernism by suggesting that it has passed; casting his historical net a little wider, Wilbur sees that the first wave of postmodern reaction has also passed. For reasons I've explored, Wilbur is often understood as a reactionary poet, but he worked past that position early in his career, learning from a wide variety of poets even as his own poetry became utterly distinctive. Or perhaps I should say that the poetry became so utterly itself precisely because of Wilbur's undogmatic openness. As Wilbur has explained in "On My Own Work," there is only one aspect of modern poetry that has not appealed to him. The revolution [in American poetry during the second decade of the century] was not a concerted one and there was little agreement on objectives; nor is there now any universal agreement as to what, in that revolution, was most constructive. But certainly it has been of lasting importance that Robinson and Frost chose to enliven traditional meters with the rhythms of colloquial speech; that Sandburg and others insisted on slang and on the brute facts of the urban and industrial scene; and that Pound and Eliot sophisticated American verse by introducing techniques from other literatures, and by reviving and revising our sense of literary tradition. Visible here is the same Wilbur who, as a young man, fostered an open political debate, even as his own convictions were clear. Visible too is Wilbur's lifelong caginess: he chooses his forebears carefully, knowing that few poets will champion Carl Sandburg and Ezra Pound in the same breath. Wilbur's one disagreement with these modern poets is that he won't "exclude anything in the name of purity."38 But I suspect that Wilbur knows, for example, that Pound's taste was rarely dogmatic; Pound promoted Sandburg, reviewed Frost glowingly when others rejected him, and even had a kind word for A. E. Robinson. This is why Wilbur is so careful to point out that the modernist movement was neither concerted nor single-minded—really not a movement at all. He

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knows that, at their best, the moderns were not manifesto writers but poets who worked to extend the possibilities of poetry. One of the joys of reading Wilbur is our knowledge that, with a long and productive career behind him, he is still continuing to extend those possibilities today.

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fter the accidental death of Frank O'Hara in 1966, John Ashbery wrote several commemorative essays about his friend. Ashbery was at the time the author of three relatively unknown books of poetry; he had recently returned to New York after a decade of living in Paris—a city Ashbery praised (in contrast to any American city) for providing a "neutral climate in which one can work pretty much as one chooses."1 Although his poetry had been included in Donald Allen's partisan anthology, The New American Poetry, Ashbery's allegiances in the wartorn world of American poetry were not clear. O'Hara's early death occurred at a precarious moment in Ashbery's own life, and the loss inevitably became an occasion as much for self-examination as for commemoration. In "Frank O'Hara's Question," Ashbery championed O'Hara's independence from both the mainstream and the avant-garde at a time in America when "the loyalty-oath mentality has pervaded outer Bohemia." The very distinction between a mainstream and an avant-garde— between the academics and the beats, the New Critical and the confessional—seemed meaningless to Ashbery in the mid-sixties: "Like most truly original artists today, when tradition menaces the individual talent 85

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in ways undreamed by T. S. Eliot, O'Hara and his achievement are caught between opposing power blocs." The reason for O'Hara's singular position, Ashbery explained, was his blithe disregard for the exigencies of American politics. Frank O'Hara's poetry has no program and therefore cannot be joined. It does not advocate sex and dope as a panacea for the ills of modern society; it does not speak out against the war in Viet Nam or in favor of civil rights; it does not paint gofhic vignettes of the post-Atomic Age; in a word, it does not attack the establishment. It merely ignores its right to exist, and is thus a source of annoyance for partisans of every stripe. Ashbery did not mean, in a debased New Critical sense, that poetry had no relationship to social concerns; his appropriation of the language of the House Committee on Un-American Activities ("the loyalty-oath mentality") suggests otherwise. But Ashbery was suspicious of claims that were being made for poetry's political power, on both the right and the left. To Ashbery, O'Hara's flagrantly uncommitted poems seemed to carry more clout than poems pledging their allegiance to social protest: "unlike the 'message' of committed poetry it incites one to all the programs of commitment as well as to every other form of selfrealization—interpersonal, Dionysian, occult, or abstract."2 Coming in the midst of the Vietnam War, this was a dangerously subtle argument; Ashbery must have known that (like the O'Hara he celebrated) his comments were likely to please nobody. Louis Simpson grabbed the bait. Writing for a symposium on poetry in the Nation, Simpson argued that poets like Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, W. S. Merwin, Gary Synder, and presumably Simpson himself belonged to no school but were linked by their common opposition to the war. More importantly, these poets were also linked by their stylistic choices; the sternly antiwar Wilbur had no place in this brotherhood because (unlike Simpson) he continued to work in traditional meters and forms. Ashbery's style might have given him a place, but (again, unlike Simpson) Ashbery did not put any stock in the "breakthrough" narrative's association of stylistic rebellion and political protest. "John Ashbery," Simpson concluded, ". . . complimented [O'Hara] on not having written poetry about the war. This struck me as a new concept of merit—praising a man for things he has not written. But it was not amusing to see a poet sneering at the conscience of other poets."3 These words forced Ashbery to make an uncharacteristically explicit gesture of self-defense. In two letters to the Nation he quoted his original remarks about O'Hara and then responded to Simpson's charges: "All poetry is against war and in favor of life, or else it isn't poetry, and it

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stops being poetry when it is forced into the mold of a particular program. Poetry is poetry. Protest is protest. I believe in both forms of action."4 Especially since Ashbery's disjunctive poetry has often been justified in political terms (the poems disrupt the reified terms of cultural discourse), it is startling to see Ashbery making such an explicit disavowal of the politics of poetic form. But because Ashbery's poetry is as often condemned as apolitical as it is justified in political terms, it's crucial to see that he does not deny that poems may have a political valence; he believes that poetry cannot perform the substantive work of social protest. Traditional poetic decorum does not carry any particular moral weight for Ashbery (just as it doesn't for Richard Wilbur), and he doesn't believe that his disruption of decorum is necessarily a mark of his political commitment. The terms of "international politics," Ashbery concluded, are too important to be clouded by the terms of "poetry politics." However inextricably related these terms may be, one will not account adequately for the other. Obsessed as he is with minute variations in the flux of experience, Ashbery is necessarily the least oppositional of poets: as he says in "Houseboat Days," "To praise this, blame that, / Leads one subtly away from the beginning, where / We must stay, in motion." However distinctive his own poems, Ashbery has stayed resolutely in motion, refusing to choose sides in the debates that have preoccupied so many American poets after modernism. In a 1967 review he noted that an opposition between "open" and "closed" form "underlies much of the art of our time." But for Ashbery himself, open form was no rallying cry, aesthetic or political: each formal possibility, he concluded, reveals "a different aspect of the same aggressive, enigmatic planet."5 This unwillingness to choose seems appropriate to a poet who writes both sestinas and aleatory free verse; in Ashbery's hands, strict formal patterns hardly seem to offer a rational organization of experience. But in the nearly thirty years that have passed since his exchange with Simpson, Ashbery has been conscripted in support of a variety of oppositional postmodernisms. Comparing his poems with The Waste Land, Marjorie Perloff grants that Eliot's modernism may prefigure aspects of Ashbery's postmodernism but concludes that in The Waste Land "there is, after all, a coherent core of relational images." Similarly, comparing Ashbery with Stevens, she cautions that "obscure as Stevens's poems so often are, they do convey particular meanings."6 One could as easily say that Ashbery's poems, however dysfunctional, contain a core of relational images (think of "The Skaters") or convey particular meanings (think of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"): champions of the Language poets have in fact said so. For Jerome McGann, Ashbery, the poet who once seemed to represent "a swerve from the poetries of

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the fifties and sixties," has failed to exploit "his own work's 'oppositional' features and potentialities," turning instead to "suburban and personal interests."7 One of the revelations of John Shoptaw's On the Outside Looking Out, the most complete treatment of Ashbery's career to date, is that Ashbery's poetry can hardly be discussed without almost constant reference to an extraordinarily wide range of precursors (among whom Eliot looms prominently): any effort to limit strategically our sense of Ashbery's openness to his modernist past is bound to do the poetry an injustice. And even if the poems seem (to those who accept postmodernism's progressive narratives) more "advanced" than Eliot's—more open to demotic language, more accommodating to popular culture, more suspicious of the lyric's unified voice—the poems are nonetheless unthinkable without Eliot's example. Ashbery's invocation of the terms of "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in "Frank O'Hara's Question" ("when tradition menaces the individual talent") was only one of many such invocations throughout the essays Ashbery wrote in the late sixties. Even without its title, "Tradition and Talent" would seem indebted to Eliot's dialectical sense of literary history. Ashbery praises Stanley Moss for his ability to be different from and yet indebted to his predecessors: Moss's work eludes "classifications of traditional and avant-garde."8 In "The Invisible Avant-Garde," a lecture delivered at the Yale Art School in 1968, Ashbery gave a more carefully nuanced version of this position. In both art and life today we are in danger of substituting one conformity for another . . . . We feel in America that we have to join something, that our lives are directionless unless we are part of a group, a clan—an idea very different from the European one. . . . Is there nothing then between the extremes of Levittown and Haight-Ashbury, between an avant-garde which has become a tradition and a tradition which is no longer one? In other words, has tradition finally managed to absorb the individual talent?9 This is Ashbery's characterization of O'Hara recast as a general argument. As in "Tradition and Talent," Ashbery wants to encourage an art that renders the opposition between the avant-garde and the tradition obsolete. He will champion neither a rejection of nor a devotion to the tradition. And just as Eliot wanted to see a dynamic interchange between tradition and the individual talent ("the present only, keeps the past alive," said Eliot10), Ashbery is interested in the past only inasmuch as it is continuously modified by innovation. Art emerges from this argument not as a singular achievement but as an ongoing process of discovery: to move forward, it will accept whatever it can use.

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The argument of "The Invisible Avant-Garde" no longer seems to describe the state of the arts accurately; the essay should be read as an analysis of the world as Ashbery found it in 1968. Even more accurately, the essay (like "Frank O'Hara's Question") should be read as a meditation on the direction of Ashbery's own career in the sixties. Ashbery concluded "The Invisible Avant-Garde" by holding up Ferruccio Busoni as an ideal artist, one who avoided the "extremes" in modern music (Arnold Schoenberg's innovation and Max Reger's reaction) by "taking what was valid in each and forging a totality." Hovering between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Busoni is crucial to any history of Western music but remains oddly unplaceable: Ashbery aspired to this position. In "Clouds," a poem written soon after "The Invisible AvantGarde," he considered his isolated place in an artistic climate in which "there was no joining, / Only separate blocks of achievement and opinion." The old ideals had been cast aside and people were restless for the new, In a wholly different mass, so there was no joining, Only separate blocks of achievement and opinion With no relation to the conducive ether Which surrounded everything like the clear idea of a ruler. And it was that these finally flattened out or banded together Through forgetting, into one contemporaneous sea With no explanations to give. And the small enclave Of worried continuing began again, putting forth antennae into the night. While the "separate blocks" eventually became indistinguishable, unified by their rejection of the "old ideals," there remained a "small enclave" dedicated to "worried continuing"—the harder work of moving forward without denigrating the past. Ashbery was a part of this small enclave. The Tennis Court Oath, published in 1962, remains his most controversial achievement even today, either dismissed as a self-indulgent dead-end or praised as an indication of the more daringly oppositional course that Ashbery should have followed. Ashbery himself remains uncomfortable with the book, maintaining that while he wrote the poems to shake up his own early achievement, he didn't expect them to be published. But having done so, having exerted his individual talent so flagrantly, Ashbery needed to renegotiate his relationship to the tradition. The Double Dream of Spring (in which "Clouds" was published) represents not a rejection of Ashbery's previous experiments but, like Busoni's music, a reconcilia-

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tion of tradition and innovation that is not a compromise—an expression of "worried continuing." Writing in the wake of The Tennis Court Oath, Ashbery himself learned how to write poems that do not confuse "poetry politics" with "international politics"—poems that do not presuppose any particular relationship between formal and ideological freedom. In the same issue of the Nation in which Simpson turned on Ashbery, Stephen Koch wrote about the members of the so-called New York School: "Ashbery is concerned," he said, "with the imaginative problem of embodying poetic time."11 Like Yeats, who began his career worrying about old age, Ashbery is a poet who discovered his characteristic preoccupation early on. As early as 1957 he praised Gertrude Stein and Henry James for embodying a constant sense of temporal flux in their prose—"life is being constantly altered by each breath one draws, just as each second of life seems to alter the whole of what has gone before"—and twenty years later he praised Elizabeth Bishop for what his own poems portray with varying fortitude: "our coming to know ourselves as the necessarily inaccurate transcribers of the life that is always on the point of coming into being."12 This triple sense of contingency (life, transcription, and a self-conscious awareness of the act of transcribing) is embodied most grandly—which is also to say, without admonition, most tediously—in Flow Chart, the long poem published in 1991. But the poems of Some Trees, Ashbery's first book, are often equally as effective in describing these processes: "Perhaps this valley too leads into the head of long-ago days," begins "Grand Abacus." Ashbery literalizes this metaphor, so that a journey into the past ("the head of long-ago days") becomes an encounter with a monumental head. "I'd like to see it," someone said about the head, which has stopped pretending to be a town. Look! A ghastly change has come over it. The ears fall off—they are laughing people. The skin is perhaps children, they say, "We children," and are vague near the sea. The eyes— Wait! What large raindrops! The eyes— Wait, can't you see them pattering, in the meadow, like a dog? The eyes are all glorious! And now the river comes to sweep away the last of us. Who knew it, at the beginning of the day? These lines almost seem like an answer to the challenge with which Elizabeth Bishop ends "The Monument": "Watch it closely," she demands, implying that the decaying monument will continue to change.

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Ashbery's "head of long-ago days" changes unpredictably: the past is not a stable object of inquiry. And as if illustrating the parable Bishop once told, apropos of Hopkins, about a hunter and his target (both of which are in motion), Ashbery concludes "Grand Abacus" by suggesting that the position of inquiry is equally unstable. It is best to travel like a comet, with the others, though one does not see them. How far that bridle flashed! "Hurry up, children!" The birds fly back, they say, "We were lying, We do not want to fly away." But it is already too late. The children have vanished. "Grand Abacus" is, like many of Ashbery's early poems, divided against itself: the children, who may be part of the monumental head itself ("The skin is perhaps children"), resist being swept up into an unknown future, but they nevertheless disappear as the poem abruptly ends. The well-known final section of "The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers" is similarly ambivalent: Ashbery describes an imaginary photograph of himself as a child, sensing that this transient version of his former self paradoxically feared change. Yet I cannot escape the picture Of my small self in that bank of flowers: My head among the blazing phlox Seemed a pale and gigantic fungus. I had a hard stare, accepting Everything, taking nothing, As though the rolled-up future might stink As loud as stood the sick moment The shutter clicked. Though I was wrong, Still, as the loveliest feelings Must soon find words, and these, yes, Displace them, so I am not wrong In calling this comic version of myself The true one. For as change is horror, Virtue is really stubbornness And only in the light of lost words Can we imagine our rewards. Randall Jarrell's favorite word—yet—is the most important word in this poem: the past is lost yet we remember it; the past seems permanent in memory yet it changes with time. "Truth" is not undermined by these

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realizations; it is reconceived by the adult Ashbery as a contingent quality even as his former self, frozen in the photograph, continues to think of it as permanent and unchanging. Yet the final lines disrupt this symmetry, seeming to merge the child's illusion ("For as change is horror, / Virtue is really stubbornness") with the wisdom of the grown man ("And only in the light of lost words / Can we imagine our rewards") as if one followed logically from the other. "It becomes plain," says Ashbery near the end of his capacious Three Poems, "that we cannot interpret everything, we must be selective." In my brief reading of Some Trees, I've had to ignore many details of Ashbery's poems in order to present a coherent narrative. And while this is true in our reading of any text, Ashbery makes us deeply aware of what we must ignore in order to make sense of his poems; "underneath the talk," he says in "Soonest Mended," "lies / The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose / Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor." One way to make sense of Ashbery's apparently dramatic leap from Some Trees to The Tennis Court Oath is to see that he includes much more "loose meaning" in his increasingly untidy poems. " 'How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher . . .' " or "Our Youth" are (in comparison to "Little J.A.") merely baggier descriptions of the same dynamic sense of time. In the manner of Marianne Moore, the first line of "Our Youth" follows on the title: "Of bricks . . . Who built it?" But this period of our youth, which seems as steady as bricks, is also like "some crazy balloon": it seems both permanent and impermanent, both something that made us and something that we made. We see that "Our youth is dead" at "the minute we discover it"; yet (the poem omits this crucial word but at every turn implies it) what we desire in the present is the incarnation of a past that will not die: "You will never have that young boy, / That boy with the monocle / Could have been your father." The poem ends by reiterating the inescapability of this Oedipal romance; the old people persist, and dreams offer no refuge. It's true we have not avoided our destiny By weeding out the old people. Our faces have filled with smoke. We escape Down the cloud ladder, but the problem has not been solved. "Our Youth" is one of the more approachable poems of The Tennis Court Oath; but strategically selective reading will make almost no sense of other poems in the volume. The opening lines of "Leaving the Atocha Station" sound like nothing but loose meaning. The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness And pulling us out of there experiencing it

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he meanwhile . . . And the fried bats they sell there dropping from sticks, so that the menace of your prayer folds . . . Other people . . . flash the garden are you boning and defunct covering . . . Blind dog expressed royalties . . . Ashbery has in fact admitted that he self-consciously produced two different kinds of poems in The Tennis Court Oath. Before he wrote the collage poems like "Leaving the Atocha Station" or "Europe," he achieved in poems like "Our Youth" what he has called an "intermediate" or "compromise" style between the poems of Some Trees and the poem "Europe": "I don't know quite why I stopped writing that way, but I feel that those are valid poems in a new way that I might well have gone on pursuing, but didn't." In the poems of the "intermediate" style, Ashbery continued to describe his moments as they passed, however waywardly; in "Leaving the Atocha Station" he attempted to embody the process: he has explained that the "dislocated, incoherent fragments of images which make up the movement of the poem are probably like the experience you get from a train pulling out of a station of no particular significance." Over and over again Ashbery justified the disjunctive quality of these poems in mimetic terms. In the dust-jacket statement to The Tennis Court Oath (which Ashbery did not intend to publish) he said his goal was to reach "a greater, more complete kind of realism." And he subsequently maintained that the "polyphony" of his poetry is "a means toward greater naturalism"—that the poet's work "is like that of Penelope ripping up her web into a varicolored heap that tells the story more accurately than the picture did."13 In statements like these, Ashbery comes closest to replicating the logic of the "breakthrough" narrative, essentializing the relationship of formal strategy and historical power. Several problems arise from this logic. In Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room" a child realizes for the first time that selfhood is an arbitrary social construction, that experience as it comes to her has no coherent order or meaning. Bishop does not embody this realization in a poem that is "consequently" incoherent or arbitrary: she remains perfectly comfortable with a simple narrative, aware that its shape is, like all systems of meaning, arbitrary but nevertheless useful. In contrast, Ashbery paradoxically asserts in his justifications of "Europe" that its incoherence is not arbitrary or contingent; it is essential to the poem's embodiment of the inherently disorganized nature of experience: this is the potential danger with an exaggerated aesthetic of embodiment. Ashbery could not go on writing in the more disjunctive style of The Tennis Court Oath because its logic offered no room for development. Seeming to break down a supposedly

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truthful version of reality, the book established a harsher, more restrictive scale of truth in its place. The experiments that Ashbery conducted with Kenneth Koch in the early sixties are more easily justified because they flaunt their arbitrariness; Koch's note to the uncollected "Crone Rhapsody" explains that the poem was written "according to the following requirements: that every line contain the name of a flower, a tree, a fruit, a game, and a famous old lady, as well as the word bathtub; furthermore, the poem is a sestina and all the end-words are pieces of office furniture."14 There's no way to justify "Crone Rhapsody" as a representation of the way experience comes to us, outside of the arbitrary constructions of narrative: its form is flagrantly arbitrary, like the unrhymed trimeter of "In the Waiting Room." Nor is it possible to justify "Crone Rhapsody" as an embodiment of a postmodern condition, and, to Ashbery's credit, he has never succumbed to this weak historicism. (In "Lithuanian Dance Band," from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, he mocks it: "Today is suddenly broad and a whole era of uncertainties is ending / Like World War I or the twenties.") Yet the specter of this way of reading The Tennis Court Oath is difficult to dispel; the poems demand a weighty justification for their obscurity. Frank O'Hara made the inevitable comparison, calling "Europe" the "most striking thing" since The Waste Land.15 Today, The Tennis Court Oath is most commonly understood as a vanguard turn away from Eliot's tradition; but it once seemed like a return to Eliot's individual talent. How then should a poem like "Leaving the Atocha Station" profitably be read? John Shoptaw offers a more compelling reading by historicizing the poem precisely: Ashbery visited Madrid with O'Hara in 1960, and though "it is doubtful that either of them ate (or shunned) 'arctic honey' or 'fried bats'" these surreal particulars "represent the experience of the overwhelming impenetrability of a foreign culture."16 But even the best interpretation of "Leaving the Atocha Station" will inevitably seem a little like special pleading. The power of the poem stems from the fact that, like a Jackson Pollock painting, it is basically unacceptable; no interpretation will justify its extravagance. But the poem can also seem, from a different perspective, all too acceptable. For all of its aura of the prodigious feat, "Leaving the Atocha Station" might be the warped but inevitable conclusion of a secondhand New Critical aesthetic: the poem that does not mean, but is. In retrospect, the place of The Tennis Court Oath in Ashbery's career appears similar to that of As We Know and Shadow Train: these more labored, idea-driven books (Ashbery has expressed his dissatisfaction with both of them) cleared the way for the synthetic poems of A Wave.

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The Tennis Court Oath similarly made Rivers and Mountains possible, if only by revealing the potential hazards of a poetics of embodiment. For "The Skaters," the very long poem in Rivers and Mountains, returns to the descriptive idiom of "Grand Abacus" and "The Instruction Manual" in Some Trees, employing spatial metaphors to describe a temporal process: "Here I am then, continuing but ever beginning / My perennial voyage, into new memories, new hope and flowers / The way the coasts glide past you." But Rivers and Mountains represents two crucial stages in Ashbery's development. "Clepsydra," the last poem Ashbery wrote in Paris is (as Ashbery himself has emphasized) a watershed in his career: "Wouldn't it be nice, I said to myself, to do a long poem that would be a long extended argument, but would have the beauty of a single word? 'Clepsydra' is really a meditation on how time feels as it is passing."17 What differentiates "Clepsydra" from "The Skaters" is that Ashbery attempts, once again, to embody that feeling rather than describe it. But he does so with a difference, avoiding his earlier idealization of poetic form. One of Ashbery's goals throughout the period of The Tennis Court Oath (as he put it in his 1962 essay on Reverdy) was to "give their true names back to things, to shake off the eternal dead weight of symbolism and allegory."18 Useful though it might be for a poet to think about cleansing words of their accretions of meaning, it isn't possible to do it. After completing The Tennis Court Oath, Ashbery seems to have realized that a writer can't stand outside discourse, thereby limiting its power; as he has recently admitted in Flow Chart, "the words have, as they / always do, come full circle, dragging the meaning that was on the reverse side / all along, and one even / expects this, something to chew on." So if "Leaving the Atocha Station" is an attempt to embody a temporal process by moving beyond the usual connotations of words (by standing outside of the ordering principles of language), "Clepsydra" is an attempt to embody that process within discourse—to "chew on" the meaning of words rather than escape them. There is no delusion of getting outside or beyond, and the result is a far more satisfyingly mysterious poem. As any reader of Ashbery knows, "Clepsydra" is nominally about the way in which one moment supersedes another, slipping from the future to the past without any sense of a teleology; more important, Ashbery makes his reader experience this sense of flux in a poem whose grammar and rhetoric conspire to disperse any clear sense of cumulative meaning. While Walter Pater cajoled us in Studies in the History of the Renaissance to savor our moments as they pass, Ashbery isn't sure if it's worth the effort to isolate any particular moment—even if it were pos-

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sible to do so: "Each moment / Of utterance is the true one; likewise none are true." But if this utterance itself seems true, consider how the rest of the sentence forces us to reconsider. Each moment Of utterance is the true one; likewise none are true, Only is the bounding from air to air, a serpentine Gesture which hides the truth behind a congruent Message, the way air hides the sky, is, in fact, Tearing it limb from limb this very moment: but The sky has pleaded already and this is about As graceful a kind of non-absence as either Has a right to expect: whether it's the form of Some creator who has momentarily turned away, Marrying detachment with respect, so that the pieces Are seen as parts of a spectrum, independent Yet symbolic of their spaced-out times of arrival; Whether on the other hand all of it is to be Seen as no luck. Writing about de Chirico's Hebdomeros (a chapter of which he translated in 1965), Ashbery said that "the novel has no story, though it reads as if it did."19 In stark contrast to the collage poems of The Tennis Court Oath, "Clepsydra" reads as if it had a story: if we ignore the semantic content of this sentence, one clause follows logically from the other, linked by a vocabulary of cause and effect: likewise, which, in fact, about as, either, whether, so that, and yet. The result is that while the meaning of the first two lines is gradually dispersed, we feel as though there ought to be an accumulation of meaning. The first six lines of the sentence might be paraphrased this way: If each moment is true, then it is equally valid to say that none of them is true. But in fact, only the movement from one moment to the other (which is like a hounding from air to air) is true. This hounding is in turn like a serpentine gesture which paradoxically hides the truth behind a message that looks like the truth. In the same way, air hides the sky, and, in fact, the sky is tearing the air limb from limb at this very moment. But such a paraphrase doesn't get us very far, especially if we extend it to encompass the entire sentence: why should moments be like air and sky which are tearing each other limb from limb? The movement, alternately sinuous and tortuous, from one metaphor to another (the temporal experience of the poem itself) is more important than any totality to which the metaphors point. Ashbery's way of wedding logical syntax with illogical content in "Clepsydra" is not in itself remarkable; it would become his primary mode of writing in most of the poems that have followed. What is crucial here is that Ashbery has given up the idea of breaking through the

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normal discursive function of language. He can now reveal how much room for slippage there is within those boundaries, gaining not just a more absorbing embodiment of temporal flux but (more important) a greater discursive freedom. In "Decoy," from The Double Dream of Spring, Ashbery no longer wants to cleanse words of their usual meanings but to exploit those meanings. We hold these truths to be self-evident: That ostracism, both political and moral, has Its place in the twentieth-century scheme of things; That urban chaos is the problem we have been seeing into and seeing into, For the factory, deadpanned by its very existence into a Descending code of values, has moved right across the road from total financial upheaval And caught regression head-on. The descending scale does not imply A corresponding deterioration of moral values, punctuated By acts of corporate vandalism every five years, Like a bunch of violets pinned to a dress, that knows and ignores its own standing. In "Clepsydra" Ashbery could use a cliche like "tearing it limb from limb" not with irony but as one among the many expressive possibilities the language has to offer. Here in "Decoy" Ashbery writes even more resolutely from within American public discourse. The syntax is not nearly as congested as in "Clepsydra," but the poem unfolds with a similarly deceptive logic, beginning with the declarative opening of The Declaration of Independence and mimicking the turns of Jefferson's periodic sentence. Within this normative structure—not in spite of it—a series of disruptions thwarts our effort to make common sense out of language that we think we already know: though we can easily integrate "ostracism" rather than "all men are created equal" with the opening line, we then expect ostracism to have "no place" rather than "its place" in the twentieth-century scheme of things. By the time we reach the last line of this passage ("Like a bunch of violets pinned to a dress"), the line feels startlingly disruptive—even though it offers the one remotely lyrical phrase in the opening movement of the poem. "Decoy" was first published in September 1967, four months after Ashbery responded to Louis Simpson's attack in the Nation: with its brash use of the language of the establishment, the poem seems driven by Ashbery's sense that no poet could write with the cleanly oppositional conscience that Simpson recommended. As the poem moves on, Ashbery says that there is "every reason to rejoice with those self-styled prophets of commercial disaster, those harbingers of gloom": as he sug-

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gested in his essay on O'Hara, a repetition of the accepted terms of revolt, however pessimistic, only serves to make us more complacent. To sum up: We are fond of plotting itineraries And our pyramiding memories, alert as dandelion fuzz, dart from one pretext to the next Seeking in occasions new sources of memories, for memory is profit Until the day it spreads out all its accumulation, delta-like on the plain For that day no good can come of remembering, and the anomalies cancel each other out. But until then foreshortened memories will keep us going, alive, one to the other. There was never an ex